Limits

I'm having curious notions lately. Because of how very cheap the player add-on is for the X-Box 360 and how even cheaper the discs are, taking advantage of the dog days of HD-DVD sounds more and more like a reasonable investment, price-wise.

One of the reasons that Universal has been so slow to release older catalogue titles on Blu Ray is because they backed HD-DVD and lost. Accordingly, most of their releases are "day-and-date" new movies or occasional films from three or four years ago. Every once in a while they'll throw you a bone with Casino or The Thing, but compared to their HD-DVD output, it's a feast of scraps.

Meanwhile, the increasingly cheap HD-DVD catalog includes all sorts of movies from Universal and Paramount, early backers of the Betamax of hi-def. Just browsing some of the reviews online, I found Dune, The Elephant Man, The Sting, Army of Darkness, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Being John Malkovich, The Big Lebowski, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Feast, An American Werewolf in London, Forbidden Planet, Elizabeth, Cat People, Darkman, The Game, The Breakfast Club, Out of Sight, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Midnight Run, Apollo 13, and The Frighteners.

Since Toshiba announced there would be no more HD-DVD players manufactured, the price has dropped like a lead balloon for the discs themselves, many of which are "combo-discs", playable in regular dvd players and HD systems. Something like Hot Fuzz, which once retailed for 39.98 is now selling on Amazon for less than $5. The player add-on for the 360 is $30 at Ed McKay's.

On the other hand (i.e. making your logical argument for you), this is a dead format. There will be no more new ones, and when the player stops working nobody's going to fix it. Firmware updates will require some hunting to locate, and I understand that HD-DVD players take a lot longer to load than the PS3 does. Eventually all of those movies will come out on Blu Ray, albeit reflecting their higher prices with neglible difference in picture quality from their HD-DVD counterparts.

I'm not saying that I'm going to do it (for one thing, I don't even have an X-Box 360, which is a huge impediment), but in terms of cost vs benefit, the risk is pretty low. So it's a curiousity, albeit a probably "stupid" one. I can hear you formulating counter-arguments right now, and I agree. Just a thought.

To show you I don't always follow the ridiculous lead, please read the section below.

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Sometimes technology goes too far, even for the Cap'n. I know I evangelize an awful lot about Blu-this and Hi Def-that but when it comes to brass tacks, I realize do feel there's a noticeable difference in picture quality. As someone who studies film, that is a benefit in instances. However, even I feel that sometimes the "next-gen" pushes it too far.

Case in point: the 21:9 television. Yes, readers, this is a tv so wide that a film shot 2.35:1 will have no bars at the top and bottom. Instead, anything less than 2.35 will now have bars on the side, including even bigger bars for full frame programs on tv or pre-scope films. That is just a little ridiculous.

16:9 tvs (what most of you know of as "widescreen" tvs or HDTVs, the rectangular ones) have admittedly redefined the "Widescreen" vs "Full Frame" dvd argument. People who didn't want those black bars at the top and bottom of their frame (because it's "cutting the picture off") are now putting in those 4:3 reformatted dvds into their fancy new tvs and realizing that "full frame" means something totally different when the screen is wider*.

Meanwhile, the uber-geeks, in their quest to continually replicate the "Cinematic" experience are looking at a truly niche tv that serves one purpose well and only exaggerates existing ratio issues. I would be stunned if this actually catches on.

The highway of entertainment innovation is littered with "cool" ideas that didn't make it because they weren't feasible: Betamax, VHD, Mini-Discs, Laserdiscs, DivX Rentals**, HD-DVD. The 21:9 TV may not fall that hard, although I have serious doubts it ever takes off outside of a very small audience.

So there you go. It turns out even the Cap'n has his limits.



* except for people who stretch full frame to widescreen, which cuts out even more of the picture. I've done some tests, and it does.
** One could argue with the current HD Rental system that this does, in fact, still exist. Just not in a useless disc format.