Australian PC User contributing editor
Blu-ray – who needs it when you’ve got AVCHD?
You’ll hear plenty of reports that the uptake of Blu-ray is faster than what we saw with DVD. That surprises in one way and not in another. The jump from VHS tape to DVD was such a huge leap in terms of image quality and in technology that it’s not surprising it took longer, longer for disc prices to come down and longer for people to take up players.
However, Blu-ray in some ways is a solution looking for a problem – sure, you get can get stellar video quality from it but these days, you can get the same thing from AVCHD. AVCHD is basically the ability to load up high-definition 1080p video onto a standard DVD-recordable disc. You still need a Blu-ray/AVCHD capable player or games console to watch the content but the encoded quality is barely noticeably different compared to Blu-ray itself.
The real difference is that conventional DVD media is considerably cheaper to manufacture than Blu-ray and so is the technology behind it. In reality, there’s no reason why we can’t have AVCHD/DVD players on the market selling for around the $AUD150 mark. DVD technology is cheap and the HD decoding hardware would only marginally bump up manufacturing costs for player makers.
The fact that many HD video cameras now virtually capture video in AVCHD format means that DVD has plenty of life left in it as a storage option. Hollywood might want Blu-ray for its copy protection but technically, we don’t really need for HD video quality.
It’s just a pity we don’t have AVCHD/DVD players at bargain prices to really make the most of the AVCHD format.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Darren Yates on September 15, 2009 at 3:28 pm, and is filed under Home entertainment, video encoding. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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