Put that thing down!

So, the World Cup has long since passed, and as a result you’re probably watching the crop of available HD channels on your Sky box and wondering what to do next.

Needless to say, the BBC content is wonderful - they’ve been doing High Definition TV since the beginning (ah, well, actually, since 1936, when they opened the world’s first regularly scheduled "High Definition" television service - but of course here we mean 720p/1080i or better). Then there’s a nice crop of movie channels and some other content. As far as broadcast HD is concerned, the UK has gone pretty rapidly to having one European channel to having several of our own, and of course right now they’re all showing off.

Are you bored yet? Well, not so much bored, but looking for something else to watch? What happens when you rent a DVD, for example, or look at something in your own collection? It looks pretty scrappy compared to the HD pictures you’re getting off the satellite, right? So… are you tempted to go out and buy one of those new blue-laser based players - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Disc - that are going to be out there soon?

Well, they’re already out in the States and they’ve provoked a decidedly lukewarm reaction. My view is that there are lots of good reasons why you shouldn’t buy one - not now, and possible not ever. Let’s list some of them.

1. There are two different formats. That is just plain stupid. There is still just time for the stupid egotistical twits who run these CE conglomerates to get their acts together and join forces. We’ve been through format wars before and they are not pretty. Don’t buy into this thing until there’s one format - or something quite different that steps over this stage of HD development.
2. The players that are out there right now are first generation units. They do not work very well. They might fall over a lot, take ages to load, and tomorrow’s discs may not play one them.
3. The discs that are out there are few and far between and are not as good as they may be later on, and they may not play on later players. Blu-Ray can’t get dual-layer to work, for example, so there are virtually no extras on their discs. The initial releases are definitely of variable quality.
4. Your existing DVD library can look indistinguishable - or certainly almost indistinguishable - from HD disc quality. If you have an HD-capable flat panel display or projector that can do native full-spec HD, that’s 1920 x 1080p (and if you do not have that capability you are missing out), you can buy a video processor that takes the 576i data from a DVD and upscales it to 1080p. Played side by side with an HD optical disc you can hardly tell, if at all, which is which, despite the fact that the processor is interpolating 75% of the pixels. And these will only get better, and cheaper.

So before you splash out on that blue-laser optical disc player, think again, and wait. Buy a cool video processor instead and enjoy your existing DVD collection and rental discs on your HD system. And you never know, maybe these two competing disc formats - competing at our expense - will simply be stepped over and we’ll go straight to a virtual distribution medium that doesn’t use discs at all.

And hopefully there’ll only be one of them.