For those of you who have a HD DVD or Blu Ray Player...

I did some testing the other day and let me express my opinions.

The simple answer is yes, but there are a few exceptions.  The set is a 37" 1080P lcd connected via vga HD DVD for refrence.  Certain HD movies clearly stand out from the others. These movies to date would be King Kong, the Matrix triology,  van helsing, batman begins I have picked up around 10 moives.  Matrix revolutions just blew me away... simply amazing

 I have put in numerous other DVDs into my player which upscales to 1080P... DVD movies like marie antoinette which was mastered in HD, look bad.... you cant even see the detail around the face and eyes and It was hard for me to even watch the movie after viewing in HD, however I put in the original star wars on dvd and this movies looks on par with the typical movie that isnt full of special effects. Its ultra clear in 1080P and looks better then most HD pictures you will see in a store running over component.

 I began to have this thought that most studios are lazy and if they took the time to produce a dvd properly, the difference would be less apparent. In dramas, the only thing your getting with HD DVD is on close ups you can see every detail on someones face... and also large city shots have much more depth.

I did some testing the other day and let me express my opinions.

The simple answer is yes, but there are a few exceptions.  The set is a 37" 1080P lcd connected via vga HD DVD for refrence.  Certain HD movies clearly stand out from the others. These movies to date would be King Kong, the Matrix triology,  van helsing, batman begins I have picked up around 10 moives.  Matrix revolutions just blew me away... simply amazing

 I have put in numerous other DVDs into my player which upscales to 1080P... DVD movies like marie antoinette which was mastered in HD, look bad.... you cant even see the detail around the face and eyes and It was hard for me to even watch the movie after viewing in HD, however I put in the original star wars on dvd and this movies looks on par with the typical movie that isnt full of special effects. Its ultra clear in 1080P and looks better then most HD pictures you will see in a store running over component.

 I began to have this thought that most studios are lazy and if they took the time to produce a dvd properly, the difference would be less apparent. In dramas, the only thing your getting with HD DVD is on close ups you can see every detail on someones face... and also large city shots have much more depth.

Bdking57

(star wars)Its ultra clear in 1080P and looks better then most HD pictures you will see in a store running over component.

1- Store TVs have horrible image, the lighting is bad, and the TVs are set to blown out horrible pictures to attract eyeballs

2- Store feeds are analog, in my experiences 90% of the time simple 480p feeds, and the more times you split an analog signal the worse it gets. 30-40-60 splits? Ouch.

3- There's a huge difference, especially as you get bigger TVs. If you want the wow factor, grab something like Happy Feet or any other CG.

Here's a comparison of Fellowship of the Ring, HD vs DVD. Keep in mind this is broadcast HD, not even close to how good HD can really get. Be sure to follow the instructions so you can see both DVD and HD

http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html

No! VHS 4 Life!Constant-Ra1n

No you're wrong! Beatmax is the wave of the future! 

:P 

No! VHS 4 Life!Constant-Ra1n

You are a little late, shouldn't you be saying, "D-VHS 4 life," by now?

It was HD on VHS type format before these current ones, and the players could actually record HD just as easily as recording was with normal VHS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS

DVHS was actually pretty darn good. High bitrate Dolby digital and a great image.

It was just a doomed interim formate, and pretty much everyone knew it.

Is there? Yes. Will you see/hear it? That depends partly on the setup you have your player connected to.

It's possible to have a really high-end HD-DVD/BluRay player, but if you have it stuck to a really crappy HDTV, or even an SDTV, then you aren't going to be able to gain much of a difference. On the same note, having killer hardware is meaningless if what you're playing on it isn't very good quality to begin with, or you are using the most basic cabling.

One big bonus with these new formats is they both start internally with content that is 1080p on the disc. So even if you don't have a 1080p TV set, the player and/or TV will have a way of resampling the data to output to something your display will be able to understand and make best use of. Secondly is the new and more refined audio codecs which allow for better quality digital sound encoding, or even - with the added space on both formats compared to even dual-layer DVD - the potential to allow for uncompressed audio tracks for the movie to play and get a real bang for your buck.

If you've ever paused a movie wanting to get a close up look at certain background objects (such as with the background jokes that happen in movies like Airplane! and just about any Zucker brothers film), you'll find the difference between (HD)DVD and BluRay to be like the difference between trying to print an 8.5"x11" shot from a 2MP camera and a 10MP camera. Finer details are more visible, and you can zoom in really good on places and things not be very blurry... but again, a lot of this was just due to using better codecs to encode the video to begin with. Just that with the new media as well, there's a lot more space available to really play with what you can get out of the formats.

big difference, i'm running my HD-DVD thru component cables to a 1080i LCD HDTV, and looks fantastic. But the thing is that it is so sharp that movies that rely heavily on Special FX with the actors interacting with the FX (King Kong) the two look like there on completely different layers, where usually it mixes in well but apart from that it's worth having

If you've ever paused a movie wanting to get a close up look at certain background objects (such as with the background jokes that happen in movies like Airplane! and just about any Zucker brothers film), you'll find the difference between (HD)DVD and BluRay to be like the difference between trying to print an 8.5"x11" shot from a 2MP camera and a 10MP camera. Finer details are more visible, and you can zoom in really good on places and things not be very blurry... but again, a lot of this was just due to using better codecs to encode the video to begin with. Just that with the new media as well, there's a lot more space available to really play with what you can get out of the formats.

It has nothing to do with codecs, and everything to do with the extra available resolution.

As a codec matures, it's always that you can get the same result with less data thanks to better compression algorithms, but that isn't a real problem.