Managing the Upgrade Treadmill

Why upgrade to the next best thing? Aren't these just cynical attempts by hardware manufacturers to get you to waste your money on improvments that will only grant you marginal enhancement?

For most people, their introduction to home video began with video cassettes with a VHS player. Before video cassettes, there was no real home video market, the occasional 16mm and 8mm show at home reductions of hollywood films and occasional tv shows notwithstanding.

VHS had a serious competitor in the early home video market, Betamax. While both formats had adherents, VHS was the victor in that war, with Betamax being almost forgotten. Most people began their first video libraries of film and tv with VHS cassettes. Next came laserdiscs, but they never presented a serious challenge to the dominance of VHS. Laserdisc players and discs were expensive and read-only and never had the market penetration of the cheaper cassettes. The cinephile had not quite become mainstream when laserdiscs were in their heyday, especially outside of Asia, so laserdiscs remained a niche item in most parts of the world.

As we all know, DVDs replaced VHS as the consumer video standard of choice. DVDs are much smaller than cassettes, do not deteriorate over multiple viewings, offer far better video and audio quality. For cinephiles, widescreen movies were being released in widescreen on DVDs as opposed to the pan & scan of the VHS releases. The Commentary track, impossible on VHS, was a standard feature, as were extras. 5.1 discrete audio tracks are common on DVDs whereas VHS struggled with stereo. Many people decided then to upgrade their old cassettes with nice and new DVDs, especially as their movies no longer had to suffer from pan & scan butchery.

After DVDs finally relegated VHS to the bargain bins and thrift stores, a new phenomenon began to emerge, the HDTV. HDTVs generally came in two categories, 720p and 1080i/p. This meant that they could display far greater resolutions (1280x720 and 1920x1080) than a DVD could display (720x480/576). However, people were not rushing to upgrade again. First, there was a format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and most of the public, justly fearing a repeat of VHS/Betamax, chose to sit this one out. Second, most consumers were content with their current video collections and had little impetus to start again a second or third time. Despite the issues of DVDs displaying on HDTVs, the adoption of HD optical video was slow. A DVD or Blu-ray player with a good upscaler, like the PS3, would present DVD video with acceptable quality on an HD screen.

So isn't it time to say enough is enough! No more will I be a slave to the Hollywood companies always trying to get me to buy Gladiator or Lord of the Rings again. But at the same time, those Blu-rays are looking mighty pretty and are very impressive on my full-HD TV. Here are some strategies to cope with the latest pressure to upgrade:

1. Netflix is your friend. For $3 more than the standard DVD subscription plans, you can take out as many Blu-rays as your plan allows for DVDs. (1-3). Considering that the kiosks at the grocery store do not offer Blu-rays where I live and trips to Blockbuster are inconvenient and expensive, Netflix is a good option.

2. Shop around. Blu-rays have a price premium over DVDs, but you can find decent deals. Avoid buying in a store, you will always pay top $$.

3. Buy what is most important first. If the upgrade in video and quality is vast, then consider that over a more marginal release.

I also have a gripe about TV shows on Blu-ray. 21st Century TV shows were often shot with HD cameras or shown on HD stations. They deserve proper Blu-ray releases. Many older shows were shot in SD NTSC/PAL video and can see no real improvement in video quality on Blu-ray. In these cases, the authoring house would be upscaling the video on the disc instead of your player. I also see no real improvement with 16mm footage shot for TV, all you get from the greater resolution seems to be film grain. DVDs can do full justice to this material. Then there are the TV shows shot on 35mm film. 35mm, even in the Academy Ratio, can see real improvement in Blu-ray format. At the time of this writing, there are few examples. However, those examples, Star Trek: TOS and The Prisoner, are very dear to me. These shows were made in the mid-to-late 1960s, and were shot on 35mm. They are considerably improved on Blu-ray, but for over 40 years they were broadcast and rerun in what we would call today SD video. I would say that we are getting it too good, seeing what the creators never intended.