Blu-ray and HD DVD and the battle for the buyers have already started. HD DVD got a small headstart through its earlier launch but now the first Blu-ray movies have started to appear as well. Throguh the superior technological assets, similar video and sound specifications and considerably higher storage capacity, many expects Blu-ray not to compromise with sound and image quality even if the price will be higher. Now it seems that the first Blu-ray products are anything but superior to HD DVD when it comes to image quality, it actually seems to be the other way around. At ProjectorCentral.com they’ve tested the first Blu-ray player Samsung BD-P1000 and they are not impressed.
Samsung BD-P1000 was tested with three different Blu-ray movies, The House of Flying Dagger, The Fifth Element and Terminator. None of these displayed any astonishing image quality and they claim in their preview of Samsung’s player that none of the movies played with Samsung’s unit, not even the best image quality movies, could reach up to the HD DVD movies’ quality.
“Overall, our initial experience with the Samsung Blu-ray player and the initial Blu-ray discs leaves us underwhelmed. The image quality does not measure up to what we would expect from a high definition source, and it certainly falls short of the hype.”
It seems the weak link is the movies and especially The Fifth Element, whose Superbit DVD release is considered an excellent image quality reference, is of exceptionally poor quality. This could be because the Blu-ray discs are encoded with MPEG2 while the HD DVD movies are encoded with VC1. This early its hard to say where the problem lies but according to the many members at AVSForum which has invested in Samsung’s BD-P1000 player the movies are the problem.
We will continue to cover the battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD, which should start growing and growing now that both teams have both movies and players out on the market.
