JUNKFILM

Welcome to the future of media viewing: 1080 lines of progressive resolution, 120 mega hertz of viewing pleasure, and online digital media live interaction while viewing.

There are 2 kind of people when it comes to new technology: 1, me, 2 my father.  Let me elaborate…  My father: loathes new technology until it has stayed around long enough where the rest of the tech-hungry world has moved on to the next thing.  And me, blindly jumps in and learns all they can about the new tech available…slowly becoming jaded and wishes they had not gone so blindly into the new tech and hung out with my father.

Remember when reel to reel was awesome?  Yeah..unfortunately, neither do I.  Then came the home accessible video media monster: VHS, beating out Beta (even though Beta was superior image and longevity).  A fun note: do you know why VHS won?  It has nothing to do with the fact that people liked VHS more than Beta.  It was because the adult industry went with it.  It was cheaper to produce and you could fit more time on each tape.  Pornos made the choice and the world sided with it immediately.   Then came the Laserdisc.  Then the VHS came back harder and cheaper.   Then DVDs.  Wow.  The iamge quailty wasn’t much better (and my favorite advertisements were the ones on VHS tapes displaying the awesome quality of DVD…if the quality was that much better, how could you possibly show it on a VHS?).

Then came HDDVD and Blu Ray.   Wow.  A quality we could finally see and possibilities of endless extras and content.  Wow.  A world at our finger tips… well, until streaming becomes normal (which, I am calling it now, will be the next step: an infinite amount of films and programs at the touch of a mouse click).  But when Blu won the format war over HDDVD, and rightly so since an HDDVD held about 20 gig total and a Blu can hold 50 gig, and the technology was crisper and cleaner… but what happened?

With a disc that can hold 50 gig of information one would imagine a plethera of extras and content that would make it worth dropping $40 on a movie.  While some discs are being released with the full potential of what Blu can offer (ie, deleted scenes, commentaries, special features…er…every thing a DVD can offer).  Blu offers new ideas tho like BD Live.  You can watch your movie with other people via online and hate the world so much more than you do now because then you get to know you paid $40 for a movie and you get to listen to some asshole’s commentary who is still making mac and cheese in his mom’s basement.  Or even worse, some prepubscent fuck who thinks he’s awesome and needs to take a break from blasting “noobz” on WoW.

Blu isn’t all that bad.  As long as you keep up with the updates and firmware downloads.  We recently had to upgrade from our 1.3 to 4.30 on our SOny BDP-S300 and now it plays fine after some tweaking and Sony PS2 tricks.  Yes, the visual quality is much better.  Yes, the sound is better.  But how about some cool shit on the Blu tech?

Sad as it is to say, most people don’t see much difference in quality from standard to 1080p.  It’s ok.  Market to them.  Why not put an entire TV season on 1 disc. Why not put every Friday the 13th slasher flick on 1 disc?  Why not put all 10 Friends seasons on like 4 or 5 discs? Cut manufacturing costs down by a 1/10th.  It costs WAAAAY less to make, you can sell a season for $15 normal (not sale priced), the full run of (shudder to think) American Pie films for $20.  Instead of these outlandish prices on DVDs of TV series (Dr WHo season is still around $70, most other TV show’s seasons run $30-50…disgusting).

Blu Ray discs have a lot of potential but very few companies are putting them to use yet (I hate them, but Disney is doing everything they can to make the most out of the new format).  The worst disc I have seen yet is the Dark Knight Blu Ray.   No commentary, no extra scenes.  Nothing.  Nothing that was exclusive to Blu over the standard DVD… so… uh… unless you’re a quality nazi, why would you waste your fucking money on a disc that just has a movie on it?  I don’t buy DVDs just to watch the movie.  I buy them to watch special features on how the movie was made and listen to the people who really made a difference, not just the actors: I like hearing from the cinematographers, directors, editors, writers.

While, by now you know I have a Blu Ray player and probably have guessed I have bought a few discs (Blade Runner and Wall-E being the ebst I have seen for content and image, while Terminator 2 being the worst all around), I still think Blu is a fabulous tech but has a ways to go before the world catches on and before it’s really worth catching on to.  I think by the time Blu does catch on as the main stay format, Streaming will be functional and bug free…. so investing in a big hard drive might be a better buy.

But, if you are already Blu-friendly, be on the look out for spending absurd amounts of money on discs that might disappoint.  Good luck, either way.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS