Blu-Ray: Or is it Blu-Rry?
In the HD-DVD race, Sony’s Blu-Ray format seems to have stumbled coming out of the gate. Now from Ultimate AV Magazine, another sign that it just needs to be put down.
The magazine reports that Samsung’s BD-P1000 Blu-Ray player has a flaw in the noise reduction chip, which is resulting in an un-sharp picture. In fact, the quality is comparable (or slightly worse) than a conventional DVD. The good news is that it can be fixed without taking the player back, but the bad news is the fix probably won’t be available before September, and you’ll have to download it and burn it onto CD yourself.
Even more hilarious, from the article: “…the BD-P1000 player does not decode Dolby Digital in surround mode for the 5.1-channel analog outputs, and does not decode DTS for those outputs at all. In the review, I stated that it does… it’s clear that the player is simply folding down a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital source into the left and right front channels. …With DTS, however, the situation is more serious. The notes in the owner’s manual and Quick Setup Guide state that if you “play a DTS DVD disc, no sound will be heard.” …, what I got instead was a dangerously loud broadband hiss, much like white noise, in either PCM or Bitstream. This same noise was a problem in the early days of DTS when a DTS track was played through a processor that did not have a DTS decoder. Fortunately I remembered that before I ran the test and had the volume on my pre-pro turned down to -30dB, where the hiss was still very audible. Caveat emptor. “
This is only one player of course, but it will hurt Blu-Ray’s market share and that’s already damaged by being a month later than the HD-DVD format. More importantly Blu-Ray is another in a long line of Sony media formats (Betamax, Memory Stick, PSP Movie) which seemed doomed by their very existance. I hope Howard Stringer is considering ditching the R and D budget for that department, because they’re killing him.