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I agree! Besides, as I've stated before, regular DVD's with a good up-converting player such as one from Oppo makes my movies look "nearly" as good as high def! Even when the war ends (if it ever does) I see no reason to move to a new player and all new movie purchases. This is just another attempt to get more money out of us all.



I finally got my taste of the difference between an upconverting DVD player and a HD-DVD player and did a couple of "side by side" comparisons. It was not at my house, but at the house of one of my kid's friend's parents. They just bought a HD-DVD player and got a couple of "rentals" from Netflix in HD-DVD. They also have the same Panny S97 upconverter that I do (which to me does a GREAT job, and I love mine at home with my projector). They have a front projector (didn't get the model) that was 1080p on to a 136" screen. We watched bits from a couple of movies. We watched a little of "300", "Batman Begins", and "The Bourne Identity"... I had 2 of these on DVD and brought them along, and they had borrowed "300" from someone else on DVD, and got the others in HD-DVD. We spent a couple of hours playing around with standard DVD resolution (yuck) compared to upconverted DVD (which looked good to me) and then popped in the HD-DVDs... WOW! I SO much wanted to get on the HD bandwagon after that. The picture of an upconverted DVD is nice, but it definately isn't HD (which we all know) and the imaging on the HD versions of these movies was really good.

Makes me wish I never went over there. There are so few artifacts with HD, less grain, better color/contrast. it was NICE. With upconversion, if the source DVD is a little grainy, you are just ending up with an upconverted, but grainy, image. No upconverter can really improve the picture quality, it can just guess (through complex algorythms of course) where to add pixels to get higher resolution. Keep in mind that the last statement sounds negative towards upconversion, and yet I LOVE my upconversion at home and am an advocate for it. I was just amazed that it would be enough of a better picture to make me wish that this dumb war was over.

As for rebuying everything in HD, that would be crazy. I only plan on getting a couple of movies that I already own in some HD-DVD format (Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars movies). I doubt that I will worry about rebuying anything else in my 300+ DVD collection. I would think that most people would do the same and only get a couple of duplicates. It isn't like the HD players can't play DVDs so I am not sure where the assumption comes in that people are going to switch out all of their DVDs...

Farewell - June 4, 2020