With streaming seemingly taking over, and with Sony apparently not planning on doing a new 4K format for BlueRay...
What are you talking about? UltraHD Blu-Ray is already on the market.
You are missing the point. 4k Blu-ray has been around for quite a while now, and many consumer electronics makers haven't bothered releasing a single model of player. Few places stock the discs. It isn't going anywhere.
You can’t accuse me of “missing the point” when the point in your brain, and what you actualy write, are completely different things!!!
You said that Sony didn’t make a 4K Blu-Ray format, which is demonstrably untrue
because the format exists, and Sony sells a player. It’s absolutely true that far fewer vendors are selling 4K Blu-Ray players, but that’s not what you said originally!
Blu-ray discs are highly variable. If you are in an NTSC zone, a large number of Blu-rays show a distinct improvement over the DVD (480 lines -> 1080 lines). If you live in a PAL zone a large number of Blu-rays look little different from the DVD (576 lines -> 1080 lines). Its not just old material, either. So much stuff just isn't that sharp. Modern animation looks consistently impressive on Blu-ray, though. 
The difference between PAL and NTSC DVD is negligible. 1080p is infinitely better than either. If a movie looks insignificantly better in 1080p, then it's because the 1080p copy you have (or possibly even the source film) stinks.
Again you are missing the point.
I’m not missing the point at all: I saw your point, and I am calling it out as bullshit.
End users don't care what the systems are technically capable of. They care about what they can buy and use. What percentage of actual Blu-ray discs in the shops look materially better than the DVD version that costs half as much? It isn't that high. It isn't nearly as high a percentage as it could be, if the people mastering the discs did the maximum they could to get the best results.
I call baloney on this, too. I have yet to see a Blu-Ray release that didn’t live up to my quality expectations, and I’m fairly demanding. I have no idea where you’ve gotten this idea about how unimpressive Blu-Ray is; ignoring the stupidity and slowness of the menus, the actual film content is great!
The reality is that not enough people care.
You’re assuming that because
you don’t notice the difference, that nobody else does, either. I reckon that it’s you who is the outlier, and that most people will notice a bigger difference than you do.
Its a similar picture with NTSC and PAL DVDs. The PAL version is capable of substantially better results. 480 to 576 lines is a significant step up in resolution, and many PAL DVDs look considerably better than the equivalent NTSC version. A lot don't, though. A lot look like the PAL version was fudged from the NTSC one.
This is mostly nonsense. Yes, PAL is a higher resolution than NTSC, but not enough to make a big difference. (It’s just 20% more lines. It’s not like 1080p which more than doubles the resolution in both axes, or UHD which does doubles both again.) And it comes at the cost of frame rate.
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that regardless of whether NTSC or PAL, DVD is always 720px wide. Depending on whether the content is 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, the pixels are either taller than they are wide (4:3), or wider than they are tall (16:9). This makes more difficult the conversion to “normal” displays and video file formats that use square pixels, since the need to interpolate one axis or the other is unavoidable.
As for whether a PAL release is copied from NTSC: that’s only done in a pinch, like with TV shows that were shot and/or edited on video. Films aren’t done this way, because the SD video masters of film originals (whether TV or movie) are done radically differently for PAL and NTSC. For NTSC, 24fps film needs to become 29.97fps of video, which is done using a process called 3:2 pulldown, which pays the film back at 23.976fps and uses 5 video fields (odd/even half-frames) for two frames of film. The fact that some film frames are shown for 3 fields, and others for just 2, can cause some roughness in motion, but the advantage is that the playback speed remains untouched. For PAL, the 24fps film needs to become 25fps of video. In the tape era (both at the consumer and broadcast level) this was normally done by playing the film back sped up to 25fps, which has the advantage that 1 film frame corresponds to 1 video frame, but has the huge disadvantage that the sound is 4% higher pitched than normal, which many people (such as myself) can readily detect. Early DVD releases tended to be produced from the master video transfers, but later they moved to doing new, clean scans of the films, saved on the DVD disc as native 24fps, and leaving the 3:2 pulldown and frame rate conversion to the DVD player, but also allowing native 24fps output for TVs that support it. Later DVD players also often perform reverse 3:2 pulldown, converting the rickety 3:2 fields back to clean, smooth 24fps.
In any case, Blu-Ray releases are done by re-scanning the original film, and often combined with some degree of restoration in older shows and movies. 35mm film, the standard in Hollywood for almost everything, has more than enough resolution to merit being shown in 1080p, and often it’s good enough for 4K, too. With movies, this works fabulously, you just re-scan at the resolution needed. For TV shows, it can be successful, but often showcases the lower production value of TV shows, because in the SD days, the sets, makeup, lens focus, etc were done for SD broadcast, even if the film captured more detail. That’s why in the 1080p release of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the makeup looks troweled on. SD blurred the makeup, HD shows off every crease and pimple. But it also shows off extra detail in everything on-screen, like the sets and props. (The entire TV industry had to upgrade its set construction and makeup for HD. Lots of makeup is now airbrushed on, because HD is so unforgiving! They basically have to operate nearly at movie standards.)
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
