“Is Blu-ray an Inferior Format to DVD?”
David Chen of /Film asks this question in a follow up to a controversial piece written by former New York Times design director, Khoi Vinh. The short answer is, of course, no, the format itself is not inferior. Not by a long shot. But the user experience is, in many cases. And just about everyone from the hardware manufacturers to the Hollywood studios are to blame.
Amongst his many observations about the Blu-ray experience, Vinh describes his frustrations with firmware updates and all-around issues with speed:
- “None of the four or five DVD players I’ve owned ever required firmware updates, but this Blu-Ray player seems to survive on a monthly diet of them. Each firmware update is labeled with a long and confusing version number (e.g., BEv1.03_090528_BDP3600_XAA) and provides virtually no clue as to what improvements it holds or problems it corrects…Speed is also a general problem with Blu-Ray. Network-connected features slow down the disc loading experience so much that I’ve resorted to disabling some of these ostensibly value-added features. Even without the network issues, a disc takes longer to load and menus take longer to navigate than on a stock DVD player.”
Both Vinh and Chen continue, describing such a level of dissatisfaction with their Blu-ray players and the media they’ve purchased/rented since investing in the format that they’ve found their hardware languishing, their disc collections sitting upon the shelf, unwatched and unloved. For them, Blu-ray has effectively killed the casual joy of putting on a movie, sitting back and enjoying the entertainment. This is a sentiment I hear time and again from friends and colleagues as they give away, sell and bin their disc collections in favour of streaming and downloading. (This image, posted in the comments section of Vinh’s post, sums up exactly why consumers often prefer alternatives to the optical disc experience.)
While the complaints and arguments are valid here and should be heeded by studio execs and hardware manufacturers (forced trailers suck, FBI warnings only punish those who’ve acquired their media by legal means, nobody really cares about network-connected bonus content, DVD/Blu-ray player owners aren’t engineers and can’t be bothered managing their hardware), there’s very little in either Vinh’s or Chen’s list of complaints that sets one format apart from the other. A menu-lite, ad-free Blu-ray like Robinson Crusoe on Mars from The Criterion Collection will load ten-times faster on my 3-year old Playstation 3 than a DVD copy of Fox‘s recent The A-Team does on my parent’s DVD player. My first DVD machine from 2001 won’t play certain discs beyond the layer change (my Criterion copy of Insomnia went only partially viewed for years.) There are still no firmware updates to fix incompatibility with that machine. Most, if not all points of dissatisfaction are hardware and software relative. Very rarely is one issue specific to a format.
The fact of the matter is that films look and sound so much better on Blu-ray. DVD can’t hold a candle to it. It simply can’t compete. The image on a Blu-ray disc offers more detail, truer colour and contrast than its standard-def progenitor, while the sound on a BD can finally be presented uncompressed, in a manner that isn’t chopping away at its fidelity. The further fancy features of the format – the network connectivity, BD-Live, Java-powered interactive features like games – are just bells and whistles that are quite often getting in the way. They don’t make Blu-ray inferior to DVD by any stretch of the imagination but studios need to recognize that in a lot of cases, their window dressing is getting in the way of the window. We consumers just want to see your movies. Don’t make it difficult to do so!
Despite my love for Blu-ray, I always recommend it to people with caveats in place. Taking the sentiments of Chen and Vinh into consideration, I would encourage anyone intent on investing in the format to choose their player wisely, if speed and ease of management are concerns (read: The Top 10 Reasons the PS3 is the Best Blu-ray Player). And if I could, I’d love to point out to Khoi Vinh that despite initial enthusiastic reviews from CNET, his Samsung BD-P3600 player has been consistently hammered by consumer reviews as a buggy, slow machine often not recommended for purchase. It’s not really fair to claim that a horse-drawn carriage is all-around better than a car just because you happened to buy a lemon from the lot.
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15 minutes to load Criterion’s _The Thin Red Line_ on my Sylvania BD player. Not network capable. Check out the firmware update procedure:
http://www.sylvaniaconsumerelectronics.com/support/firmware_instruction_player.php
This is an excellent blog post about this issue. I bought a PS3 for many of the same reasons listed, as its upgrades are smoother.
What happened to putting the disc in the player, and pressing play? Now there are these loading menus, the special features are not always on the disc. BD Live ‘recommends’ new releases on the main menu. I’m constantly bombarded by more and more advertisements. They already got my $30 from buying the thing, do they really need to shove more junk down my throat?