Blu-ray or Not Blu-ray?

By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 2, 2006 4:15PM

Last Thursday evening Chicagoist had the chance to attend a special advance screening of the movie The Architect, which goes into release on December 15. We'll be reviewing the actual movie that week, but right now we'd like to talk about the screening itself. The movie was projected in Theater 1 at the Landmark Century using a brand-new Blu-ray DVD player. That is, there wasn't film running through a projector; instead, a Blu-ray DVD of the film was outputted to a video projector.

In case you haven't heard of Blu-ray, it's a new high-definition DVD system which enables increased picture quality and storage. HD boasts five times the amount of detail compared to standard definition, and a typical Blu-ray disc can store between 9-23 hours of video. The first consumer units of the new Blu-ray player started shipping from Sony on December 1. And the new players can handle standard DVDs as well.

So what's the catch?

Blu-ray is being released at about the same time as a competing format, HD DVD. And naturally, the two systems are not compatible. Can you say "betamax" or "MiniDisc?" We know you can. Inevitably, one of these formats is going to bite the dust, though which one is anyone's guess. You can bet that consumers will most likely stay away until there's a clear choice.

Aside from that though, we'd like to comment on the quality of what we saw. Since The Architect was actually shot on HD video and not film, making a comparison to standard film projection is a bit tricky. In a nutshell, HD video looks very, very good. But it does not look like film, if you look closely. A certain softening or "glowy" quality is noticeable, especially during closeups and in bright locales; and subjectively speaking we've always felt that HD gives the image a somewhat clinical, sterile quality.

Taking all that into consideration however, the screening was excellent. The sound of course was no better or worse than at an ordinary movie (digital sound is digital sound). The picture was clear, detailed, and glitch-free. Due to the reasons we stated above, no one would confuse it for film. But at a substantially lower cost for filmmakers, digital filmmaking is an increasingly attractive option for the movies.

But how would Blu-ray compare to the DVD player you already have at home? To be blunt, unless you're a technophile with a whole lot of extra money it's not worth the switch yet. Yes, the picture quality is better. But unless you have a big-screen HD TV the improvement is mostly negligible; it's certainly nothing like comparing VHS to DVD.

Our prediction is that whichever format eventually wins out, whether Blu-ray or HD DVD, in the near future high-definition DVD will be mostly used for theatrical projection. We think it will take quite some time for the average home consumer to be convinced that the new benefits are worth ponying up the extra cash to replace DVDs that look perfectly good as is.