1kyle's Opinion: Sony drops the ball again (Blu Ray and HD-TV)

[1kyle]

Blu Ray looks destined to become the latest in a whole series of Sony White Elephants.

From a company that almost invented consumer electronics it looks like it's taking the first steps to joining those other great corporations who've come and gone.

We now in the UK have great HD TV (High Definition TV ) and the HD TV screens are just flying off the shelves at the moment (and NOT A SINGLE SONY HD TV in sight).

SKY TV now supplies Hard Disc units in their new (HD TV enabled) digiboxes for recording movies on and there's no restriction either.

The size of the hard disc is also sufficient for something like 36 hours worth of films AT HD QUALITY.

Who in the world is going to pay over 1000 USD for a BLU RAY device (incompatable with previous formats) to play highly DRM'ed films.

The new BLU RAY devices are going to be absolutely riddled with DRM to stop recording and copying of movies and the DRM issue is one of the reasons SONY has given as to why the launch of the product is much later than expected.

Who also will pay 30 - 50 USD for a movie when you can get the DVD for 20 or wait a little bit and get it in HD format on your nice new SKY digibox.

It's strange but the only device SONY currently make which is getting rave reviews is the new RH1 MD recorder (and to think that at one time the MD looked dead in the water).

There needs to be changes at the top of the SONY corporation.

Any SONY EXECS reading this - PM me and I'll send you a CV. I'm available immediately and will do the job a LOT cheaper than your current crop of CEO's.

Any more of these Not wanted or Wrong Product at the wrong time gizmos and soon there won't be a SONY corporation in the future.

BTW I've seen (standard) DVD recorders in TESCO in the UK now for as little as 36 GBP. Amazing isn't it.

How in the world SONY missed the boat on HD TV I'll never know. It's going to be the hottest selling gizmo soon - especially with the World Cup coming up this Summer.

To any of our Friends across the Pond the World Cup really is a WORLD competition - even the USA is taking part this time.

That other so called "World Series" Baseball event isn't World at all. There is AFAIK only 1 or 2 CANADIAN clubs in it even assuming they make the play-offs.

This summer HD TV will really come into it's own. Once you've seen it looking at ordinary TV isn't the same any more.

Cheers

-K

Edited April 13, 2006 by 1kyle

[Richard]

I think you're confusing HDTV with HD DVD. I have a Sony Bravia HD compatible LCD TV. Sony actually sold more LCD TV's in Q4 2005 than it's major competitors combined - the majority of which were HD compatible.

You are obviously also forgetting all the Sony HD Handycam's that got very good reviews.

You may also want to have a look at this:

http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.act...&site=odw_en_GB

I think also it is unfair to say there are no other models getting good reviews:

As we mentioned this morning the latest Mobile GPS units are getting good reviews, if you open this months Empire magazine for example there is a top-end Sony DVD player with 5 stars. The DAV-X1 home cinema system is doing well, there are plenty of Cyber-Shot camera's out there getting good marks.. the list goes on.

[1kyle]

I think you're confusing HDTV with HD DVD. I have a Sony Bravia HD compatible LCD TV. Sony actually sold more LCD TV's in Q4 2005 than it's major competitors combined - the majority of which were HD compatible.

You are obviously also forgetting all the Sony HD Handycam's that got very good reviews.

You may also want to have a look at this:

http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.act...&site=odw_en_GB

I think also it is unfair to say there are no other models getting good reviews:

As we mentioned this morning the latest Mobile GPS units are getting good reviews, if you open this months Empire magazine for example there is a top-end Sony DVD player with 5 stars. The DAV-X1 home cinema system is doing well, there are plenty of Cyber-Shot camera's out there getting good marks.. the list goes on.

Glad to see they are finally making a shout about the Bravia but in most of the places I've looked at in the UK these are VERY thin on the ground if they are available at all.

LG seem to have this market pretty well under their control followed by Philips (who against all odds seem to be still competing with the Japanes, Koreans etc).

I suspect that by the time the BRAVIA is commonly available in the UK the world cup will have been and gone. In a "tight" consumer market HD-TV was the brigt spot on the market.

I'm not saying SONY is doomed. It's camcorders are highly regarded and the partnership with ERICCSON has produced a cracking set of world beater mobile phones. Some of the Cinema sound equipmebnt is fine as well.

I haven't confused HD-TV with HD-DVD (or at least wasn't my intention).

Pushing top end (standard) DVD players is a dead end technology due to the current limitation on playing them on large screens.

With standard TV anything over about 26 inches and you really notice the grain / lines (NTSC 525, PAL 625).

NTSC shows the lack of lines earlier than PAL which has a slightly higher resolution so can be "enlarged" a little bit more. However PAL (on non LCD screens) suffers from some faint flickering which can be removed by some more expensive TV's using a "frequency doubling trick").

DVD payback limitation these days (assuming Legally manufactured DVD's) is due to the limitations of the current TV standards rather than the DVD playback machine and paying top dollar now for a DVD player is just a 100% total waste of money.

The really useful feature I find on old DVD recorders is the one thing SONY never did. By using DVD-RAM you could start watching the beginning of one program AT THE SAME TIME AS RECORDING the end of it, or even another program.

Anybody who'se ever used a DVD-RAM recorder will I'm sure have found this really useful. - One up to PANASONIC (MATSHITA) here.

Most of the really large screens you see in Bars, Hotel lobbies etc just look like plain rubbish. Improving current level of DVD's is really just a waste of time.

You can get brilliant DTS sound out of a cheap Supermarket 25 GBP DVD player ("Buy one, Get One FREE") and the picture quality is more than adequate for current (non HD) TV's.

HD TV is a totally different ballgame. Even a 60 inch screen looks awesome.

What the Sky digiboxes can do is to RECORD the movie from the satellite on to a Hard disk which can then be played later in HD TV format for you to enjoy on your nice new HD TV. I've no idea of the file format on disc but plugging in Video and Audio leads to one of those video senders will also alow you to record on to a "Conventional" DVD or play on an Ordinary (I.E non HD) TV as well.

There doesn't (from playing around with the disk on the digibox) seem to be any DRM stuff on the files. These transfer on to a computer and back again but you can only play the film via the digibox as the internal recording is definitely proprietary and doesn't conform as far as I can see to standard DVD recording formats.

I don't think this is actually an issue and certainly won't push BLU-RAY sales. I would suspect that a generalized (possibly open) HARD DISK based solution will be the future rather than a whole dogs dinner of competing (probably incompatable) DVD formats riddled with possibly poor compression and irksome DRM restrictions.

Unlike Music where ears (for some people) can put up with quite a considerable loss of fidelity, poor video shows up at a shot and people are much less tolerant of it.

Like all future predictions some will go wrong, others will prove correct and in rare cases users will find a use for future technolgy that the designers never even thought of - the most recent case being Mobile phone Texting. Now a major income, but when mobile phones just started coming in to the realm of the ordinary public texting was thought to be just a "gizmo - it'll never take off".

However I don't see BLU-RAY as going anywhere - wring device at wrong time.

Cheers

-K