|
WASHINGTON—A
sales guy at the electronics store tried to make a point
about the relative picture quality of the high-end
plasma and LCD TV sets lining the walls.
There
isn’t much of a difference, was his pitch. “It’s not
like you’re going to have two of these sets sitting next
to each other in your living room.’’
Sure,
man—nobody would ever do that. Except I just did. In the
interest of trying to figure out how to get the
clearest, sharpest picture, I went a little overboard. I
now have several thousand dollars’ worth of large,
high-end TV sets and high-def DVD players on loan,
crowding my living room.
A couple
of weeks ago, I made a few phone calls and got my hands
on two of the better-reviewed, most expensive TV sets on
the market—a $3,600 Sony Bravia 46-inch LCD set and a
$8,000 50-inch plasma set from Pioneer.
The idea
was to create my own elaborate version of the Pepsi
Challenge: Which set would people prefer? And which of
the two competing next-generation movie formats, Blu-ray
and HD DVD, is better?
To level
the playing field, I picked one of the few flicks
available on both formats, Mission: Impossible 3, and
watched chunks of it six times in a row while looking
for differences on each screen and in each format. Then
I invited friends over a couple of nights last week and
repeated the process a few times.
At this
point, I see a singed-in profile of Tom Cruise on the
backs of my eyeballs whenever I blink, but that’s the
price of scientific research. I just wish the results
were more conclusive.
Here’s
the deal: The highest TV picture resolution offered on
the planet is called “1080p,’’ a reference to the number
of lines of resolution, but there isn’t a lot of content
available at this resolution. You might think regular
DVDs look great on your big, honkin’ high-def plasma TV,
but you need a special “upconverting’’ DVD player—a
device that plays DVDs and uses clever technology to
artificially fill out the picture to simulate
high-definition.
Blu-ray
and HD DVD both produce a picture quality high enough to
take full advantage of 1080p. But some movie studios and
tech companies support one technology, some support the
other. Not many titles are available in either format,
but Blockbuster announced this past week that it will
soon carry Blu-ray movies in more stores and largely
ignore its competitor. Netflix offers both.
For this
experiment, I used the Sony PlayStation 3’s Blu-ray
player and an HD DVD player that Microsoft offers for
the Xbox 360, coupled with a remote switching device
from Accell.
This
format war is the Betamax vs. VHS showdown of this
generation, you could say. It’s a bit less interesting
than that old rivalry, though, because most of us are
still pretty happy with our DVD collections. That’s one
of the few solid conclusions I can draw from the big
experiment.
Both
sets delivered startlingly good pictures—that much was
unanimous. Most of my friends preferred the plasma TV,
though a few liked the LCD screen better. The deciding
factor for most came down to a preference for either the
deeper black shades of the plasma or the general
brightness of the LCD screen. (I didn’t, for the record,
tweak either TV’s settings.)
I
included an upconverting DVD player from a company
called Oppo Digital and got the same conflicting
verdicts. I was impressed by the player’s picture
quality, which one technophile friend pronounced
“godlike’’ for its ability to generate what nearly
appeared to be a full high-definition picture. On the
other hand, another friend grumbled that he expected
better.
When it
came to trying to spot differences between Blu-ray and
HD DVD, both formats won a round or two each from my
test groups, but there was no hands-down winner. One
friend—who is such a techno-snob that he once complained
about the quality of a jet my friends were planning to
rent for a bachelor party—ultimately preferred Blu-ray
on the LCD TV and HD DVD on the plasma set.
And,
finally, one friend said she couldn’t tell the
difference at all between any of the pictures I showed
her in either of the formats on either screen.
There
was only one recurring verdict in running through this
taste test a few times last week, first proffered last
Sunday evening by Jim Burger, a reader who suggested the
subject of this column. Burger, who owns a plasma TV and
an upconverting DVD player, came over last week to check
things out himself.
Yes, he
said, he could tell some differences between the picture
offered by the fancy upconverting DVD player and the new
would-be DVD replacements. He also preferred the plasma.
But no, he’s still not impressed enough to reach for his
wallet and buy Blu-ray or HD DVD.
“It’s
not worth all the hassle and the money’’ to upgrade to
the new formats, he said. Most of my other high-def
TV-owning friends said the same.
So much
for the amateurs. Finally, I invited TV industry analyst
Gary Arlen over. Arlen happens to be in the market for a
new set, but I’m not sure I helped him with his
shopping.
Arlen
was quickly able to spot where the fancy DVD player
tripped up in delivering crisp images during a visually
complex scene that involved a staircase and a large
crowd of people. He was most impressed by the way the HD
DVD player handled the same scene on the plasma set. As
far as the other big differences he noticed in the other
scenes we looked at—well, there weren’t any.
“This
confirms to me that, to any but the most avid video
lover, it’s hard to make a choice,’’ he said. “I hate to
say it, but they’re all great.’’ |
