VHS and Beta- poor quality, tracking is annoying, no movies released on it after 2006 except for a handful, pan and scan.
laserdisc- non-anamorphic, hard to find, having to switch discs is a pain in the ass
blu ray- lack of picking up where you left off is annoying. images look almost *too* sharp in some cases.
DVD- contains none of those problems
DVD wins.
DVD is crap. Far too limited.
I do agree that lack of auto-resume on some Blu Rays is annoying. It's literally the only area where the format falls short. If you think Blu Ray looks too sharp you need to turn down the sharpness on your TV as this setting is usually defaulted far too high.
blu ray- lack of picking up where you left off is annoying. images look almost *too* sharp in some cases.
Either you have a faulty BD player or you don't know how to operate it properly.
Unless you are happy with a less than 30" screen and CRT, many DVDs do not hold up well these days. In fact, DVD digital artefacts on 40" LCD/Plasma (the new average) look worse than VHS does, in my opinion. If the blu ray picture being too sharp is sometimes a problem then I'd happily have that over the problems and restrictions that every other format has.
No format is perfect.
Glasgow's FOREMOST authority Italics = irony. Infer the opposite please.
If you have a decent upscaling Blu Ray player the artefacts from DVD shouldn't be too obvious. Especially if you have one that can play NTSC discs in their native 24fps mode. PAL DVDs (and 1080i/50hz BDs) annoy me due to the speedup making everything squeaky, but at least my old Region 1 DVDs no longer suffer from 3:2 pulldown induced motion judder.
shareDVD has worse sound than anything else. Assuming your VCR does VHS HiFi. However, upscaled it does look pretty good, good enough to reveal the film grain.
shareNot all DVDs have crap sound, just the majority. Some have full-bitrate DTS or PCM stereo, it's only lossy Dolby Digital that sounds weak and muffled. Then again a lot of early Blu Ray titles only have Dolby...
share"If you have a decent upscaling blu ray player"
So you DO need another format besides DVD. Not only that, you need a decent player to take advantage of it.
Glasgow's FOREMOST authority Italics = irony. Infer the opposite please.
If not for upscaling I wouldn't be able to tolerate DVD at all. Check my previous post, i'm firmly in the pro-Blu/anti-DVD camp.
Also, upscaling DVD players are crap. They don't have the processing power to upscale properly so they leave gaps between the lines of pixels, as opposed to a BD player which makes the upscaled image looking nice and solid. Even with HDMI connection, a DVD player will just blow up the image without filling in between the lines.
Yes
Glasgow's FOREMOST authority Italics = irony. Infer the opposite please.