Sabotaging the Sony Playstation 3 market?

The point that companies (and evidently you) miss about consumers is that if it can upgrade SD-DVD to HD quality, what's the point in purchasing the Blu-ray Disks? On top of that, upconverting DVD players are more and more common. The point is if you have to explain to consumers why it's "better", you already lost them. That's why the jump to 120 Hz is such an opportunity. It's immediately evident what the difference is. Consumers just don't see or care about the difference, unless it's the geekiest who are counting pixels with a magnifying glass. The rest of the market cares about availability above picture resolution. That's why Netflix integration is such a hit suddenly, despite it's less than stellar library. On top of that, Netflix demonstrated HD streaming capability. HD is just an incremental jump. Digital distribution is a true revolution.

The very fact that because my existing DVD collection looks like HD quality on my PS3 shoots the point of buying Blu-Ray in the foot; compound that with the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy on retail shelves for under $25 per movie, and it's clear why the format is failing. Sony needs to wake up and realize the HD war is over-- they can start lowering prices drastically now and get people buying. I don't think Sony is deliberately sabotaging themselves-- it's generally in their nature to drop an anvil on their own foot. Beta anyone? How's that mini-disc format holding up? They need to stop hoarding formats to themselves and be more receptive to ideas like Netflix, a guaranteed revenue boost with very little investment. A few lines of code and the PS3 audience can stream movies into an all-inclusive package. About the only thing I don't do for entertainment on mine is watch live TV and surf the internet (the latter of which only because I don't like using a controller to mouse around the screen). The biggest mistake however lies in the fact of keeping the PS2 on the market and eliminating the backwards compatibility for it on the PS3. It actually leapfrogs over the PS2 games and allows you to only play PS1 in addition to PS3. So what happens when your PS2 dies and eventually the system is no longer available? Sorry, you've got a bunch of discs you can't play anymore-- no PS2 emulation for you (granted, I bought the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle pack which does have emulation, but it's now the last model to ever contain it). In the end, Blu-ray is merely a tiny step up when my current DVD's look just as good, and infinitely cheaper. What Sony really needs is to get better exclusives, stress that their online gaming network is free compared to XBox's Live network, and push the Home social network to the MMO community.

The Netflix conflict with Sony Pictures was simply a license-renewal problem. According to sales data from Home Media Magazine, upconverting DVD players made up 20% (90k) of the 457k DVD players sold. Blu-ray players sold 147k. Hmm... why aren't people buying upconverting DVD players? If the upconverted DVD playback experience is so luxurious, you'd think they'd be selling well considering how many people have big DVD collections to make use of, and the players are considerably cheaper than Blu-ray players. I don't see how DVD upconversion rest solely on the shoulders of Blu-ray... Isn't the point of a Blu-ray player to play trueHD 1080p, not to fake it? Place all the blame where it blongs: on the lack of upconverting DVD player sales. DVD had 3.5 million players sold at this point in its life, while Blu-ray has somewhere in the upper 2-million sold, if I recall correctly. Blu-ray sold 1.54 Million movies in its 3rd Black Friday week. By comparison, during DVD's 1999 (third year on the market) Black Friday week, sold 817k. Considering the economic times we're in, things are looking pretty bad for Blu-ray! Oh wait... GOOD?! No!!!! How can this be!!! We must spin this into a negative! Downloads are not a revolution: they're a step back in terms of quality and another in special features. You're stuck renting for short periods of time and paying a premium simply for the convenience of only having to wait for the video to load: which can take longer than driving to the video store.

Also, Blu-ray is not a Sony format. They have less than a third of the stake in the format. There's an entire Blu-ray Disc Association that is made up of all the companies who have a say in things. This just goes to show you how little some people know about even the most entry-level Blu-ray facts. I wouldn't listen to much these people have to say.

Mr. Bunch, Please, please, PLEASE stop repeating the lie to uninformed consumers that "upscaling" makes standard definition (720x480) DVD look anything like true high definition (1920x1080) content on a Blu-Ray disc. A standard definition has 345,600 pixels in it. That is all it will ever have. Scaling a 345,600 pixel image up to 1080p, or 2,073,600 pixels, does not add any information to the picture. It simply renders the same amount of information in a higher resolution. Want to know a secret? This is what your 1080p television does with EVERY IMAGE YOU FEED TO IT. A "fixed pixel display" (basically any set that is not a CRT) ALWAYS "upscales" every image it receives to match the available number of pixels it has. THIS IS WHAT AN "UPSCALING" DVD PLAYER CAN DO FOR YOU. If you have a cheaper TV, it may well be that a DVD player with its own scaler will do a better job converting a 480p dvd image into a 720p or 1080p one. It will not ADD detail to an image. It will REDUCE unwanted "false information" from the image. It will make better choices as far as which lines to add or drop when converting the image. ALL TELEVISIONS AT 720P OR ABOVE "UPSCALE" OR "UPCONVERT" EVERY IMAGE FED INTO THEM. You do not need a new DVD player to do this. The question is simply whether a DVD player can do it better than your TV. High definition images have 921,600 or 2,073,600 pixels in them. People who claim that they get an image which looks "just as good as HD" from a disc which has 345,600 pixels worth of information are either grossly misinformed, legally blind, or lying through their teeth. Anyone who has really looked at both could practically tell the difference with a blindfold on.

Also, it makes ZERO sense for the good of the format to advertise that it makes DVDs look good enough to not care about Blu-ray. I'm trying to make sense of it and all I can think of that this would do is help sell a few more players, but it would teach consumers NOT to support the actual format.

Also, Playstation 3 sales are still ahead of Xbox 360 sales by the same number of weeks in their respective life cycles. Just saying. I agree that they can do more (e.g. cutting the price, more aggressive bundling - I suggest Singstar...)

Another factor in whether an image looks "just as good as HD" is the size of the display and the distance a person sits from it. Ever look at a comic in the newspaper from three feet away? Ever look at it real close? Can you tell the difference? When you're up close, you can see the "dots." Well, the same applies for television. If you are watching on a set which is 30 inches or smaller, it is very unlikely you will be able to tell the difference between a properly scaled 480p image and a properly scaled 1080p image. It's just like reading the newspaper from 4 or 5 feet away. Each comic looks equally clear (and tiny). You need to have a set which is greater than 40 inches, I would wager, to truly see the difference between 480p, 720p, and 1080p. The human eye can only discern a certain amount of detail. It's just like going to the eye doctor and looking at the chart. You can't discern the detail on the tiny, tiny "E" because it is too small for the viewing distance you're sitting at. This is why you need to sit in the "sweet spot" for whatever size TV you have (A rule of thumb I've heard is no more than 3 times the screen size diagonally). Google "television viewing distance" for plenty of articles and calculators on this issue.

Sorry matthewweflen, but you are totally off base on this one. As a graphic design professional who spends all day staring at screens and working with images, let me explain the truth of the DVD upconvert matter. Certainly HDTVs are capable of resizing video to fit the size of their screen. Everyone knows this. What you don't understand is that there are many different resize methods available, and each offers widely different results. Typically, HDTVs resize standard def input signals using nearest-neighbor resampling. This is the fastest and simplest way to resize an image, and any Photoshop user could tell you that a nearest-neighbor resize results in a "blocky" image of mediocre quality. Quality "upconvert" DVD players use a more advanced resize algorithm, most likely bilinear or bicubic resampling. Again, spend several seconds in Photoshop and resize a 850x480 (standard definition @ approximately 16:9) image by a factor of 2.25 to 1920x1080 (high def) using bicubic resampling and you'll see a HUGE improvement over the same resize using a nearest neighbor algorithm. On a powerful bluray player like the PS3, other upscale features are available, including noise reduction filters. With some minor tweaking, a DVD can indeed look almost as good as its blu-ray counterpart. And I'm neither legally blind, grossly misinformed, or lying through my teeth. Do your homework before expressing such a strong opinion.

And as for the line "You need to have a set which is greater than 40 inches, I would wager, to truly see the difference between 480p, 720p, and 1080p." Are you joking? As the owner of a 32" LCD TV, I can guarantee you that anyone - from a 5-year-old child to a grandparent - can tell the difference between 480p and 1080p at that size. Anyone. Obviously you don't own an HDTV.

I go away for the afternoon and things get crazy. To answer a few questions/comments: edgeoftheblade: "The point that companies (and evidently you) miss about consumers is that if it can upgrade SD-DVD to HD quality, what's the point in purchasing the Blu-ray Disks? On top of that, upconverting DVD players are more and more common." In large part, I agree--especially if all you're interested in doing is upgrading your old library. But I think there's something to be said for getting a top of the line upconverting DVD player that also allows you the option of playing Blu-rays (the image quality on which is better than upconverted DVDs, and allows for easier menu navigation). And digital distribution is a revolution in just that: distribution. We're a ways off from having widespread Blu-ray-quality movies downloadable from the web for everyone in this country. Mr. Squirrel: All good points. myothercar: Sony is the pioneer of the format, and the PS3 is by far the best selling Blu-ray player out there (if I remember correctly, it's outsold every other type of Blu-ray player combined). The format is going to live or die based on how Sony plays things. matthewweflen: demonspectre takes care of your objection to my hyping of upconverting better than I could. All I'll say is this: Blu-ray is clearly superior to an upscaled SD-DVD. But an upscaled SD-DVD looks pretty darn amazing on the PS3. Not quite as good as on Blu-ray or HBO HD, but close. They look good enough to make people pass on buying their libraries all over again; but if you give people the option between purchasing a new movie in SD-DVD and Blu-ray, you're better off getting the Blu-ray. That's my larger point: Sony needs to market this system as something that will benefit not only future purchases but past purchases as well. Otherwise the average consumer will be put off by the idea of having multiple DVD players set up or having to buy their old libraries all over again.

Demospectre, All of your jargon does nothing to answer the objection that "upsampling" does not add any information to an image. A 480p image upscaled to 1080p is (drumroll) a 480p image. Whether or not an "upconverting" player does a better job interpolating new lines of resolution than your television to give you a pure 480p image is the ONLY question. You will still have nothing more, EVER, than the data which is encoded on the DVD disc at 720x480. 720X480 is not high definition. It never will be high definition. It can never look "like" high definition. It can look better than the product of a poor scaler if you use a good scaler. But it will look as good as 480p can loon, and ONLY that good. Being a graphic designer doesn't mean you know squat about televisions. So I direct your statement about research back to you.

Sonny_Bunch: " But an upscaled SD-DVD looks pretty darn amazing on the PS3. Not quite as good as on Blu-ray or HBO HD, but close." What are you viewing your DVDs and Blu-Rays on? I am willing to believe that the PS3 has a better scaler than your television. But if a 480p image looks "close" to a 1080p image on your display, it is either too small, you are sitting too far away, or it does not display all of a 1080p signal. Despite what demonspectre says, I own a 50 inch Sony SXRD television which displays 1080p images. It is one of the best reviewed televisions of its cohort among rear projection HDTVs. It has been calibrated using the Digital Video Essentials Blu-Ray disc to ensure that it truly displays all of the information in a 1080p test signal. I own a PS3 and an "upconverting" Oppo player, also extremely highly rated for its scaling abilities. I have compared SD transfers of the same film with their HD counterpart (e.g. Baraka, The Prestige, 2001, Alexander Revisited). It does not look close. It is nowhere NEAR close. I am perfectly willing to claim that anyone who alleges that it is "close" is either misinformed (i.e. has improperly set up equipment) or has an ideological axe to grind.

@ matthewweflen: Jargon? Hehe. Ironic. This question of quality has absolutely nothing to do with the "presence" of image data. Obviously a high-def image contains more pixels than a standard def image. No one is contesting that. Upconversion does not magically grab high-def pixels out of thin air. But it does interpolate what pixels would appear there if the image WERE high def. For gradient tones - such as skin tones, sky, foliage, anything like that - such interpolation produces remarkably similar results to a high def counterpart. If you don't believe this, here's an easy way to demonstrate. Find a picture with dimensions of 1920x1080. Make sure that this is the native size of the picture - don't just resize a smaller image to match those dimensions. Now open Photoshop. (Or if you don't own it, the free GIMP will work just as well.) Reduce the size of that image to 720x480. This is your "standard def" version. Duplicate this two more times so that you have three 720x480 images open. Resize one of these images back to 1920x1080 using "nearest neighbor" interpolation. Resize another back to 1920x1080 using bicubic interpolation. Then compare. I think you'll agree that the bicubic interpolation looks remarkably similar to the original picture, and for moving frames this similarity is even more pronounced. Proper interpolation does not restore the original pixels. That's not the point. Rather, as is the meaning of the word interpolate, it uses math to estimate what pixels should be there. The result? In most cases, something surprisingly close to the high def original. I totally and completely agree with Sonny on this one. To quote: "Blu-ray is clearly superior to an upscaled SD-DVD. But an upscaled SD-DVD looks pretty darn amazing on the PS3. Not quite as good as on Blu-ray or HBO HD, but close." This is absolutely true, regardless of how expensive your TV is. I would happily wager that you are the one with misconfigured equipment, as the rest of us see a great picture for upconverted DVDs while yours sounds quite poor.

@Sonny Btw Sonny, great article, and you've nicely highlighted Sony's troubles in marketing the Blu-ray format. I've talked to coworkers who thought Blu-ray was something to do with video games - and had no idea it was primarily used for movies. Like you said, consumer ignorance has been the death sentence of many a good media format.