When it comes to new technologies, I’m usually quick to jump on the bandwagon and adopt them as soon as the price meets my perceived value. With that being said, this did not apply when HD movie devices first hit the market. I was not interested in the least bit. It may have had something to do with the format war between Blue Ray (or Blu Ray for the serious people) and HD DVD. Maybe it was because I was an early adopter of DVD (I bought the PS2 on launch day), and never though I’d see a movie as clear as the Matrix on DVD. I even bought one of those up-scaling DVD players a few months back, and really thought that that was probably as good as it gets. Boy was I wrong.
I waited to jump on the HD bandwagon. I had some options that well exceeded my perceived value of the technology. For the longest time I was seeing the HD DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360 for around $100-$150 with 5 or 6 free movies, or the PS3 retailing for $400 with just as many free movies. I kept thinking to myself, “I sure would hate to buy one of these and end up with a useless piece of garbage if the format is not supported in the future.” So I waited. I read articles about which studios were going to be supporting which format, and what the experts were saying would end up being the standard for video, but I didn’t see a clear winner until earlier this year when Toshiba finally said “Enough” and dropped the HD DVD format. And now people like my brother who have an HD DVD drive are up a creek without a paddle.
Anywho, after all that was decided, and the dust settled, and I got a really good deal on a PS3, I joined the HD Movie watchers club. The only problem, I’m broke, and like to watch movies that lack quality as opposed to shelling out thirty bucks a pop for a single movie disk. However, last night a friend of mine let me borrow Ghost Rider on Blu Ray. Now, as a disclaimer I must say that I never wanted to see this movie. Even as a superhero movie buff, I thought this one looked like a stinker, and as superhero movies go, its plot was average at best, but I must say the HD experience made this movie awesome! The fire, water, ice, and wind special effects really popped! WOW! I didn’t really know what I was missing!
Long story short, if you have an HD TV and don’t have a High Def player, you should really get one. It may not improve the quality of the movies you watch, but it will make the ones you see much more enjoyable. Heck, I’d probably watch an hour and a half of a turd glistening on this thing!
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