We have owned a spanking new Sony Bravia TV for a few months now. Our purchase was fueled by the fact that this TV won all consumer awards hands down (I know I need to have 1080i, I just have not figured out yet why) and I confess to being successfully wooed by the advertising. The success of the balls ad, followed by paint and then the play-doh bunnies has worked extremely well for the brand and the TV sales.
We then needed the full HD effect of course, so we bought Sky+ HD. I was still not very impressed.
So we then bought the HD DVD player extension for our Xbox 360. But we needed some DVD's. So we bought these too. Hmmm ... the image did look kind of sharp. Nice.
So I turned to a fried of mine expressing my exasperation after making the significant investment into the world of HD and not really seeing the difference. He pointed out that on a football match you can actually see the audience's faces and blades of grass versus the fuzz in a regular non-HD picture. Okaaaaaay.
While my battle at home to fall in love with HD still continued, there was progress outside in the marketplace. With interest I read this week how Sony have won the HD DVD war with their Blu-ray technology. Yay for us for having a Sony TV but major loss on the Xbox addition (we will eventually need a Blu-ray DVD player).
HD has been backed technologically by Toshiba and Microsoft, whereas Blu-ray has been backed by Sony, Apple an Dell. While consumers are still confused about the difference, so am I. I walked the halls of CES in Vegas last year and still am confused. In a nutshell, I can help explain that HD-DVD is cheaper whereas Blu-ray is superior quality (but this only makes a difference on TV's larger than 42 inches).
The real battle is being won on a) the technology side (as more companies defect to Blu-ray) and b) on the content side. The studios are choosing to release their content NOT on both formats but choosing only for one. This will close the debate for good (and consumers will win in basically, just not having a much choice moving forward about what they want to watch). HD backers are Paramount (Viacom) and NBC Universal (GE) whereas Blu-ray is backed by 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures (of course), MGM, Disney and Lionsgate. The big news this week was from Warner Bros who defected to Blu-ray. Game Over.
My story ends last Sunday, as I was pressing the Av toggle button on my Bravia trying to locate the picture from a regular DVD I wanted to watched when I discovered the AV5 option. With full HD. Meaning that I had NOT been watching HD for at least 6 months with all our equipment. Oh my goodness. I am proud to be very impressed by the TV quality of HD! I am now cool (and a shmuck for not figuring it out sooner).
