Also in this issue:

• News & Features
  Best in Show
• Good Life Guide
  Elie Bleu Straw Marquetry Humidor
• Good Life Guide
  Audemars Piguet Millenary
• Good Life Guide
  The Scarf
• Up Front
  Out of the Humidor
• More from this Issue

Of Course You Know Disc Means War!

Rival Blu-ray and HD DVD camps are battling for your high-def disc dollar — is it time to choose sides?

Steve Morgenstern
From the Print Edition:
Dennis Haysbert, Nov/Dec 2006

And if you'd like to improve the visual splendor of your current DVD collection, the same kind of video up-converting accomplished by the Blu-ray and HD DVD players reviewed above is available without switching formats. DVD players that incorporate video enhancement technologies are widely available—a small company called Oppo (oppodigital.com) sells a highly regarded model for $199. Or you can turbocharge all of your standard-def viewing with the DVDO iScan VP20 from Anchor Bay Technologies ($1,699), which sharpens, enhances and up-converts standard video to a pristine high-definition signal, squeezing the most pleasurable picture possible out of good old NTSC.

Disc, Drive or Download?
Potentially the most interesting question of all in considering the Blu-ray/HD DVD wars is whether the future of high-definition viewing will rely on discs at all. In my home, for example, there's never a shortage of high-def programs available for viewing on a slow Saturday night. We have DirecTV service with a TiVo hard-drive-recorder-equipped set-top box. That means we can scan the program listings, pick out a few movies and TV shows that sound promising and record them from the satellite service to watch at our leisure. The same digital video recorder capability is now common on most cable systems, and high-definition video-on-demand services are picking up steam.

Still on the technological fringes, but moving inevitably toward the mainstream, is something called IPTV. It stands for Internet Protocol TV, and gives viewers a two-way connection with a provider who can send scheduled programs as well as respond to viewers' input with requested programs. Sounds a lot like today's high-end digital cable systems, right? Except IPTV works over a broadband Internet connection, opening the possibility of thousands upon thousands of programming choices, while providing strong competition to cable and satellite TV providers. Verizon is already delivering both standard-definition and high-def television service in test markets. While IPTV, like on-demand cable, currently works as a pay-per-view system, there's no technological reason why you couldn't pay once for the privilege of "owning" your favorite film in high-def, but instead of having it physically reside in your home, have unlimited access to the bits and bytes stored on the IPTV system's computer servers, ready to watch on demand.

While plucking high-def content as needed from the great digital motherlode appeals to my technocentric proclivities, I'm betting that, for the near future (say till the end of the decade), people will still want to own movies on disc, paving the way for rapid growth in high-def DVD ownership. Unless we see major changes in alliances or technologies, Blu-ray seems poised to win the battle. Player prices will come down, but the deciding factor will be the availability of high-def movies and TV shows and concert videos and so forth, and Sony's role as both content publisher and technology promoter gives the company a unique advantage.

Still, I'm advising all but the most devil-may-care early adopter to wait until next year to make the leap. Player prices are unreasonably high, the number of available titles is distressingly low, and the lack of an Internet port on most of today's Blu-ray players just ticks me off. And I say that even though I'm planning to ignore the public relations folks as long as humanly possible before giving in and returning my high-def disc player review units.

Steve Morgenstern is a Cigar Aficionado contributing editor, who writes regularly on technology issues.

< 1 2 3 4