I hear it's fun but also really, really gay. I own it but I haven't played it yet.

EDIT: When I say gay I mean gay. Disco gay. Calling his wife fat and ugly and then hitting on men gay.

I have a Wii, a 360, and a good PC. No need for a PS3.

Okami actually did well compared to most of the games Clover released. Good enough so that they are porting it over to the Wii. I look forward to owning both versions. Great game.

Shadow of the Colossus was a monster of a game (no pun intended), ICO was one of those games you can't just pick up and dive right into. It took work and time to get into the story and characters. Something most people don't have patience for. I myself still have not finished it though.

...they only ever made 3 games.

Got a Wii, 360 and PC. Honestly, why the hell would I drop another 500 bucks on a console that doesn't have anything that I want/can get on the other 3 alternatives?

Wow, Joncy. You're right! You really are right! Zooming in at some rediculous level to a still frame to show that DVD looks even crappier than the crappy blueray still is so indicative of the typical home theater experience.

Umm... did you happen to look at the screens before he zoomed in?

They weren't zoomed in.

Blu-Ray Tony is how Blu-Ray movies look when I watch them on my monitor.
DVD Tony is how DVD movies look when I watch them on my monitor.

This is how DVD actually looks on a real HDTV.

The frames were not altered in any way. They were actual screen grabs, one from the actual Blu-Ray movie (running at full screen) and the other taken from the actual DVD movie (running at full screen).

I'm not sure how much more clear I can make this but I know you have a track record of being a little slow on the uptake so I will restate it again:

These images were not altered! At all! This is how DVD actually looks! You are dumb, your opinion is dumb! LEARN

kop and wookie suck, ps3 is pretty much all bluray player since its only got a handfull of exclusives, and maybe a palmfull of decent ones.

i'm gonna wait till some time toward the end of next year to get a triple.

360 is pretty awesome because of its nice selection of games, especially now its getting some mediocre nippon spreadsheet sims for the hardcore.

You could have simply stated that the cropped images were at their full resolution and not zoomed in but apparantly you need more words to convey simple concepts which might have been what threw me off. I never said "high def" material didn't look better. Simply that the leap beyond DVD isn't enough to get me excited. I don't care if it is enough to get you excited enough to spend your money on.

Which is why your opinion is wrong.

I had no problem understanding him. I think you were too ready to attack him that you didn't really read what he wrote.

yeah, I was waiting and waiting for ps3, and was really predjudice against the 360. but the price of the ps3 was really high and I don't have a HDTV so thats not all that important. then the Xbox Elite came out. That console is a 120GB piece of hardware goodness! not to mention the games [Mass Effect rules!!!!] are a lot better that what are on the ps3. if you are still trying to decide between the two consoles, then take it from me, go and buy an Xbox 360 Elite. it really is the best deal. believe me, I've obsessed over this for monthes...

I supposed when you get down to it, it is really up to price and what games you want.

oh yeah, about Xbox Live, it really is as good as everyone says. it has quite a few great features, plus you can play music while you play a game[good for driving games] and you can do a lot of things easier than you can with the ps3.

but that's just my two cents. and a nickle or two.:D

To add to the HD comparision, here is a comparison for DVD Vs. Blu-ray of Kingdom of Heaven.

Independence Day DVD vs. Blu-Ray

Blu-Ray Vs. HD Apple TV vs. HD Cable vs. DVD vs. SD Apple TV

Do remember that how good a HD movie looks still depend on the individual movie's tranfer. Some movies have great transfers (Disney movies in general), while others are bad. Older movies can look great in HD too. Bladerunner and 2001 A Space Odyssey have better transfers than some newer movies.

as far as good or bad transfers...

just about everything buena vista home entertainment (this includes disney and miramax) releases has a damn good transfer... some of the first releases are not so great

lionsgate is a mixed bag... some good some "meh" though none that are absolute junk (though if you own the extreme edition T2 the bluray isn't much of an improvement... if they'd rerelease with the studio canal transfer (currently available on french and uk hd dvd releases) i'd say it would be worth it)

warner for the most part has been good (as long as you don't ask the bitrate counters who gripe about lower bitrate because of hd dvd) a few catalog releases have been "meh" but most have been good

universal is the one to watch out for... if they start dumping out catalog releases without new transfers on bluray expect plenty of heavy edge enhancement with obvious halos and even some digital noise reduction on certain releases

paramount is like lionsgate... a bit of a mixed bag

I didn't attack him. I made the mistake of assuming that his cropped images were zoomed in. Maybe I didn't read his post correctly but his condescending and insulting response was more of an attack than anything I posted. But that is the style of internet tough guys like him.



Well, you're screen captures are obviously from a computer. My experience is that computers tend to render DVDs substandard. Now, of course, the definition of Blu Ray (I could care less what the proper format of the name is) is far greater but I don't think a still is indicative of a flowing movie. I have noticed that newer DVDs and DVDs with good transfers look very good upscaled through HDMI on my TV. I can tell older movies and substandard transfers as they appear grainy. To me the benefits of HD movies do not out weigh the expense at the present time. As I said before, if you don't mind spending several hundred for a new player and more for each movie for the improvements Blu Ray offers then so be it. I understand that my opinion to not spend additional money on an emerging technology is wrong in your opinion. So I'll just stipulate that I am wrong so you can triumphantly claim a win in this debate and call me retarded again. I would say you could call me a mental midget but midgets might be offended by that remark which would make it wrong to say. You can't call me gay either unless you literally mean I am happy, which I am not. So retarded and redneck apparantly seem okay at the current time since those are groups which Massassi condones offending.



Okay, dude, I love my 360 Elite but other than hard drive space you aren't tapping into the benefits of the Elite. Both Pro and Elite offer the HDMI that you aren't using. My point is that you would be as well off with virtually any 360. The large harddrive just means that I don't have to delete the tons of stuff I download over Live for free all the time. I do like how the 360 upscales DVDs through HDMI as well as getting the highest res for games.

I'm not trying to bag on you just that you expouse the virtues of the Elite when you aren't getting all the benefits yet. Fortunately you will when ever you upgrade your monitor.



Again, I would never argue that DVD looks as good but practically speaking an HD movie might not seem like a huge leap in the typical hometheater setup. Your typical monitor is 50" or less and viewed across a room. To me the bigger bang for the buck is HD programming over SD programming but I refuse to upgrade my service because I hate the restrictions cable boxes put on my setup.

Too bad your experience is dead wrong. Computers, of all devices, probably render the DVDs the best, because it's a direct digital display. Not only that, but PCs have the best quality scaling available, which far exceeds the abilities of your average upconverting DVD player.

All in all, the PC is going to provide a far better display than your HDTV system will.

But this isn't what you originally claimed. You claimed that the difference between bluray and DVD wasn't something to get excited about. Which you'd have to be nearly blind to not see. I can understand not wanting to shell out for the rather expensive players, but not wanting one at all ever?


For someone who doesn't care about the difference between DVD and bluray, you sure get uppity about this. Besides, nearly every game out there doesn't run in 1080p, nor does DVD look any better upscaled. If he's using component he's not really losing anything, assuming his TV supports 720p/1080i.

Also, many Pros now come with HDMI.

You do realize the jump from SD programming to HD programming is nearly the same as bluray?

You have: 480i -> 1080i for SD -> HD programming
You have: 480p -> 1080p/1080i for DVD -> Bluray

this

When I was first learning about HD stuff a few years ago, I could not for the life of me grasp people's issues with upconverting, i.e. TVs that did a poor job of it. I was so used to my computer being able to flawlessly display any video of any size at any resolution. It seemed so basic a thing that I had a hard time understanding how anything could mess it up.

And yes, upscaling is never an increase in quality. All upscaling does is scale the original content to match the native resolution of your display. It'll either happen at the source (upscaling DVD player) or on the display itself (upscaling TV). Most everything seems to do a ****ty job of it, though, actually making it worse.

Probably depends on the video card and monitor setup. Playback I have observed on computers is inferior to my home theater setup. Of course my setup might be above average for video. This is a minor point of contention though as I concede the inferior resolution of DVD but I don't concede that DVD looks drastically substandard on the typical setup. It definitely is not as sharp but not an orgasmic level of improvement with HD-DVD or Blu Ray.



I might have said something near that but I believe it was more along the lines that the leap in qualitity is not so drastic as to make the purchase nearly as obligatory as DVD over VHS was. I also didn't say I wouldn't ever want Blu Ray but I probably alluded to not wanting to but it when the successor will be far superior to it and DVD. To me this is almost the generation to skip as the benefits are not so great to make it a must buy while technology is bound to improve.



I believe he said he didn't have an HDTV which makes the advantage of HDMI moot. I also pointed out that Pros come with HDMI so the only advantage he got from the Elite was the larger HDD. Both of those features our essentially irrelevant to his expierence with the 360. In my opinion he is lauding the 360 for features he would enjoy from "lesser" 360s. Not that it matters. I like my Elite as well.

[/QUOTE]

Technically, yes, but in practice broadcast quality sucks. Have you not ever watched a DVD that looked better than the same content broadcast over the air or on cable?

What the hell. What are you even argueing?

Generally you are correct. But a setup that properly upconverts can "simulate" a higher resolution. Similar to how some claim their DVDs look so much better on a computer but as Jon C showed, the still screen shot looks just as bad as ever.

Apparantly Blu Ray makes you feel special in your special place but I haven't experienced that yet so I'm retarded.

What do you mean? The most you could do to "simulate" a higher resolution is add filtering or processing to clean up the image after resizing, and there's nothing out there to my knowledge that does that effectively for video, certainly not in real time.

It's not a claim. It does look better on the PC, period. If you believe your HDTV system looks better than your PC is either:

A. Broken
B. From 1997
C. Hooked up to a TV

Seriously. That or the size is playing tricks on your mind. Hell, PC monitors even have better response times than HDTV sets.

Also, of course a DVD looks better than broadcast. It's not 480i, and it's not facing interference. But it's still hardly even comparable to the massive change in resolution from DVD to Blu-ray.

Not on DVD upconverting players, there isn't. But there sure as hell is for PCs, which is exactly my point. It's practically impossible to have a upconverting DVD player be better than a PC, unless it too is a miniature PC in itself.

I was referring to things more like fractal algorithms that would cause even a quad-core PC to choke in real-time, especially on HD images. If you aren't using an advanced algorithm, all you've got left is sharpening and crap that doesn't even help that much.

Yeah, but you can use better resizing schemes too, like bicubic resizing, etc.

And you'd be surprised what you can do especially with a GPU to back it up. See also: avisynth

Less format arguing, more PS3 bashing!

I just want to say that Shadow of the Colossus is awesome.

another thing of note... the PS3 is now a Profile 2.0 player

This has turned into a quote war thread "you said this so you suck!"

ok instead of bashing the ps3 im gonna make a pitch for the 360

CRACKDOWN
CRACKDOWN
CRACKDOWN
CRACKDOWN
CRACKDOWN
CRACKDOWN

any other game is for chumps

Well, technically it'll look best on a really good native 480p TV. You always loose quality in upscaling unless the resolution you upscale to is exactly four times the original one, but then you aren't really upscaling, you're just using four pixels as one.

But yeah, a PC will usually win when upscaling is involved. Sometimes people think it looks worse because you see all the defects and grain that are hidden by the distance to the TV, or the bad picture quality of the TV itself.

Also, the difference between 1080p and 480p is not negligible under the right circumstances. If you have a decent HDTV and a proper distance, it's more than a subtle difference. Period. It's one thing if you don't want to shell out for it yet, but don't go making claims that it's a negligible difference.

If you don't believe me, play a game at 640x480 and then play it cranked as high as it will go.

Rolf Harris plays the 360.

Of course there is no real increase in resolution but my experience shows is that DVDs upscaled through HDMI, at least by the XBox 360, are noticeably sharper than the same DVDs through component connections and not upscaled. I wouldn't say it is a massive difference nor equal to the higher resolution of Blu Ray. That would be dumb.



With regards to the PC that is none of those are the case for me. There is also far more to consider than simply what the response time of a monitor is. DVDs are limited in resolution, bit rate, and frame rate so the better capability of a PC is mostly moot. Hardware of a high quality specifically designed for rendering DVD video is certainly not going to be surpassed by typical computer setups.

With regards to to broadcast quality you didn't seem to get my point. HD programming is going to look far superior to typical cable or over the air broadcasts more so, in my opinion, than Blu Ray will look over DVD. At least a quality DVD.



I guess the 360 could be considered a miniture PC.



Of course the resolution gains are pretty. My point was that the gains for the money for the average consumer are neglible right now. I would rather not spend more than $300 for a new player and then $30 for movies at this time. Early adopters always pay a premium, it was essentially the same for DVD except movies were not as expensive as Blu Ray is.

Also, another view of mine is that Blu Ray could be the technology to skip. Resolutions are bound to increase and DVD is probably here to stay. When the next higher def format comes out I will consider it. Or quality Blu Ray players are sub $100.

Oh noes, Halo 3 and Gears of War on PS3? Well not really, they're just Unreal Tournament 3 mods used on the PS3.

Also sugar pills cure cancer

Single-layer Bluray discs are 25 GB. A full-length 1080p movie encoded with MPEG4 AVC is around 8 GB. The next resolution bump will be to 3840x2160 and the industry plans to start rolling those out... in 2015.

A full-length 2160p movie encoded with MPEG4 AVC should be around 30 GB. So I guess they'll have to start using dual-layer Bluray discs by 2015

OH THE WOE OF BEING AN EARLY (2 - 9 years after launch) ADOPTER

Oh, and why is that? Because it is "designed" for it? You don't know what you're talking about.

Fine if you don't care about the subject matter but there is a reason that those with money to burn don't simply use high powered PCs as the workhorses of their home theater.

500 dollar quad core processor with a 512 meg 8800GT versues a 30 dollar DVD player
You tell me which one upconverts better.