Today I watched two HD-DVD movies via my Toshiba A2 and from my Samsung 40" 1080p LCD. The Toshiba of course was sending it a 1080i signal via HDMI.

One was "The Wicker Man", and the other was "Children of Men". This is not a review of those movies. This my review of how unimpressed I was with how well they looked in 1080 resolution.

HDTV for the most part blows me away with how good it can look. Watching "Shark" tonight in 1080 from my local OTA CBS station was so crisp and detailed and good looking I didn't even notice the acting.

Yes, a good football game or Blue Planet/Planet Earth in 1080 alone justify the move to HD resolutions. I don't know if these movies were just poor excuses for HD-DVD (the story would have been as good in SD) with no really detailed scenes worth expressing in high resolution, or if maybe my Toshiba was reading the SD DVD version by accident. The "Children" movie was a combo disc. "Wicker" was not.

So is anyone else out there not too wowed with HD-DVD or Blueray movies they've seen? Maybe it's just me. My eyes have been rather dry lately.

Sometimes it's just the way the movie is. Both of those movies are reported to have good (although not reference) HD transfers.

How far are you sitting away from that 40" screen?

I sit about seven feet away. My wife is an eye doctor and I've got 20/15 vision thanks to custom lasik. I know very well everything relating to perception and vision accuracy over distance. I do see and appreciate great 1080 detail from that distance. I just finished each movie and realized there was not one moment in either that I thought "WOW, Look at that great image!". I DO find myself muttering "WOW" periodically when the image is a great 1080 example from DirecTV or an OTA channel. My TV can switch between 1080, 720, and 480 with the remote. It is very easy to see the difference in quality between these choices from my sitting distance. My wife sits about 10 feet away and also often glances up from her work to say "That must be High Definition!" when in fact the image is from a 1080 source and being shown in 1080 on the 40" set.

All movies are different, so it is hard to compare different movies, you also have that different films used and lens options can affect the final pic. For HD DVD there is also one other issue (that I brought up a bit over a year ago when BD launched and fanboys said BD looks bad compared to HD DVD based on a handful of movies made from bad old films) the BW is really too low, in the beginning with very few titles coming out the techs were taking a lot of time to make the encoding and tweaking them for quality. But as lossless audio is added (from Warner) and Universal trying to push out a lot more titles that limited BW is becoming ever more a determining factor on the quality.

Yep, I'm guessing as time goes by and the market for HD movies grows the time spent to make a great HD release "may" go up. I'm sort of feeling like with the market so small, the movie makers are thinking "lets not waste alot of money on this HD release thing until it proves to be profitable".

I've been backing up my SD DVD moves to a hard drive and watching them on my HDTV from a computer. With the computer doing the upscale to 1080p they look pretty darned good. No detail where there was none before, but still a nice visual experience.

no the opposite. Look at DVD vs HD DVD or BD. How many new titles are on the DVD shelf every week and how many on BD or HD DVD? How many titles did any studio release in the last 12 months on DVD and on BD or HD DVD (depending on what they support)

It doesn't matter, Anthony. As I said I was just guessing. As with all guessing only the future will tell. Thank you though for adding to this thread. This forum has been pretty slow lately.

I recently returned my blu-ray player (thanks to Costco's liberal return policy) and am using an OPPO upscaling player, which acquits itself quite well. We tend to watch movies for content and find that virtually all releases that interest us are on SD discs, or if they are on an HD format, they are hard to come by. It appears that only about 20% of new movie releases are on HD, and many of the blu-rays we watched were not significantly better in quality than looking at a SD version upscaled on our OPPO. A really good blu-ray can be quite stunning for sure, but availability of titles and the stupid blu-ray/HD battle raised my annoyance factor to the point that I'll just wait until this modality matures a bit more.
My 2¢

All good points, Bruce. I'll watch an HD-DVD movie, but a variety to choose from is hard to find. I've added a PC to my living room and now can access all my SD DVDs burned to a hard drive. Watching them upscaled by the computer to 1080p on my 40" LCD is pretty sweet, and since I have a vast array to easily choose from I've been watching 5 or 6 SD DVDs to every one HD-DVD lately. They aren't releasing movies in HD fast enough to keep me satisfied.

I do know why they bother, though. Those of us that bought HDTVs and actually have an HD source for it have discovered the benefit of that higher resolution. I personally was delighted to find out there would be movies in HD coming out to take advantage of my display. The potential hasn't yet been met. Someone needs to invent a movie disk that has Bluray on one side and HD-DVD on the other. Then every movie that comes out should be released in both formats on the same disk, and everyone no matter what player they have can enjoy the movie.

Warner's working on it. (Seriously)

I realize the difficulty of the challenge, to put BluRay on on side and HD-DVD on the other. It sure would be sweet to see the problems solved, though.

On a related topic, I have a bunch of movies that I burned to very cheap no-name DVD-RWs, and found that anything I put on those very cheap discs can not be read reliable on any DVD player in my house, or even the drives that made them in the first place. However, the Xbox HD-DVD player so far has read and played every one perfectly. I'm guessing it's the greater precision of the blue laser or some related aspect that makes this a better reader for SD DVD disks. Either was, I'm very impressed.

i found VERY low combatability with DVD-RW's (aswell as CD-RW's) so i now use strictly DVD-R's (or on the rare occasion CD-R's) and have never had any problem with them.

it is not that dificult, but you need all the players (more politics then anything else) to play nice

When CD was created it was 1.2mm thick and the data was on the opposite side of the disk. The laser passed through the 1.2mm of plastic to read the data. When DVD was created the data was moved to .6mm, in theory it could have bueen 1/2 as thick but the thinner a disk the more fragile it becomes, so it became two bonded .6mm disks. BD has the data at .1mm. You can in theory have .1mmBD and on the same side at.6mm the HD DVD or BD, but even simpler is to make a BD that is half as thick (.6mm) and stick it on the back of a 1/2 DVD or HD DVD.

The original DVD was at SL DS DVD-10(though people don’t like DS) because all you did was make two independent 1/2 disks that were glued together. Then they found out that you could make it to read through the first layer and read the second. So disks made the same way but meant to read both 1/2 disks through the same layer were created. The first DL where created the other more complicated way and that lived on in DLDS (DVD-18) .

A BD/HD DVD (or DVD) could be made in several ways

1)make a 1.1 HD DVD (or DVD) and then add the .1 BD on top
2)make a .6mm BD and ½ a DVD-18 and glue them together
3)make a .5mm HD DVD and add a .1 BD and glue it to a .6mm SL HD DVD

They've already been making HD-DVD/DVD disks. I've got a few. Flip the HD-DVD disk over for SD DVD.

Stealth, you're right. Ever since I found out those cheap DVD-RW were (nearly) worthless I've been using DVD-Rs with no problems. I bought the Cheap DVD-RWs mainly to use as resuable data backup, but they never worked out for that, much less anything else.

right on. i even use cheapo no name dvd-r's without any issues (i frequently burn UFC fights for buddies so these discs get around)... i recently got a spindle of 100 for about $20!