There has been a big debate in optical media war, between the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Both formats have their own disadvantages and strengths. It’s is clearly interesting to see who will win the competition. But, if there’s one group that will benefit from such competition, it would be customers. We have some concerns about how optical media technology is implemented in the industry. As an example, we could find an obvious flaw in the whole design. As an example, we find that widescreen movies don’t always fit widescreen TVs. This is one glaring problem that needs to be addressed soon. One thing that we should consider is trying to bring people to the high-definition area. Widescreen technology is something that will eventually become the standard. Widescreen TV will become cheaper and optical media will also become affordable.
Regardless of which format we choose, it is clear that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray offer significant improvement from standard DVDs. However, each new technology will require early adopters, even the old VHS technology in the 1970’s. It is also good to know that players for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD offer backwards compatibility for standard DVD format. Although, it is already rare to see 4:3 TVs sold in stores, it doesn’t mean that nobody is using it anymore. Millions are still used in households around the world. For this TV set, people may need to stay with older optical media, such as DVD or even the old VCD. Picture quality is still acceptable when seen from a distance with older TVs. However, eventually people will grab widescreen DVDs. We should be free from pressure associated with TV formats. Compatibility is probably something that that keeps people away from high-definition format. We will need much more requirements when we want to see high resolution movie formats.
Unfortunately, this can be rather confusing for many people. However, they should start from the basics, by considering about the aspect ratio of their own TV set. There are major formats that are used by the industry these days. It is also important for consumers to not choose, devices that force them to perform too much configurations. In this case, we need to make sure that the whole configuration has the proper aspect ratio. As an example, many movies are stretched horizontally, while others may look better when stretched vertically. In this case, it is important to make sure that our TV set could match the most commonly used formats in the market.
Widescreen TV should have aspect ratio that allows us to experience videos that are not distorted. Obviously, it is not possible for us to avoid distortions completely, because some movies could use old aspect ratios and resolutions. Fortunately, latest smart TVs are able to accept many kinds of smaller aspect ratios and resolutions. However, playing older VCD and DVD may cause movies to appear grainy, because the amount of data stored for each minute of the movie is much less than what’s available inside HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs.