Over at Big Hollywood, there is a curious essay about the failure of Blu-Ray technology to make a profit when working with Hollywood’s classic films.

Not really a surprise, though. When you watch an action-packed, many-things-at-once modern Hollywood film in high definition, the difference between a Blu-Ray disc and a DVD is thoroughly and immediately obvious. Try watching a Blu-Ray of, say, Iron Man using an HDMI cable and a decent flat panel display, and then watch the same scene on DVD using RCA cables. Big difference, and if you can’t spot it, you are simply not looking.

Now look at the classic film market. Pop in a Blu-Ray of Casablanca, which is shown in a square 1.37:1 aspect ratio, in gloomy black and white, on re-mastered film, in mono sound. Then switch to the same scene on a DVD. Not a lot of difference there.

In fact, it almost sounds as if movie industry executives expected to see Blu-Ray magically colorize the film, put in 7.1 surround sound, and offer exciting new camera angles in high-definition. It will not happen: your DVD copy is plenty good enough.

Then there is the issue of price. Most Blu-Ray titles are quite a bit more expensive than a DVD copy, and no surprise there, either. It takes a lot of work to make a Blu-Ray (even though the final output of a classic film may be little better than the DVD), and you pay for that labor.

Also, the typical Blu-Ray these days is a package, not a disc. Open up your Blu-Ray cassette and you find the Blu-Ray disc, a DVD copy for the van and portable DVD player, as well as a digital copy for your computer at home. $30 is a great price for all three discs, but really: do you want to cough up $30 for a Blu-Ray package when you can just get a $15 DVD that offers pretty much the same quality? And are you really going to watch the digital copy? Ever? After all, you can pop the DVD into your home computer and get a better quality version than the highly compressed digital copy, and it won’t eat up a few gig of space on your hard drive.

Blu-Ray is unsurpassed in its own context. When he obtained his Royal Blu-Ray player, the Czar began to switch over on a case-by-case basis. Iron Man 2? Blu-Ray. Up? Blu-Ray. Um… Daredevil? Bargain-bin DVD. Madagascar 2? Bargain-bin DVD. The Day The Earth Stood Still (original version)? DVD. The Day The Earth Stood Still (Reeves version)? Trash can.

Look, people went nuts for classic films on laser disc and later on DVD because there was reason to. Watching a VHS tape of Strange Brew for the fifteenth time looked like crap. Laser discs fixed the problem of flagging, warbling, and static on the screen; DVDs improved the overall quality and eliminated the annoying pause halfway through the movie. These were huge technological advances. But outside of rapid action sequences, CGI realism, and booming stereo sound, what does a Blu-Ray offer? Not much, if your classic film lacks any of that.

You might not realize it, but the Czar is a big fan of Blu-Ray. Sure, it’s slow to load, and every new disc always wants us to update the software on the player (which takes a bit of time) before it will play, but the right display, the right cabling, and the right movie totally makes up for the weirdness. That said, folks shouldn’t be despairing over the format just because Sony failed to realize that the consumer was smarter about technology investments than they were.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.