Format War ’06: Duck and cover, it’s on

Head for the hills! The battle has commenced. Today Samsung officially drops their first consumer Blu-Ray player, the oft-discussed BD-P1000. Some hooligans had located a store or two that had broken street date, so they won’t be the first Blu-Ray players out there, but they will be the first official ones.

But must we pick sides now that the fight has been joined in earnest? Our sibling site PC World has a thorough review of the BD-P1000, and how it stacks up to the first two Toshiba HD DVD players.

Among the Sony and Lionsgate Blu-ray movies I watched, I observed a distinct trend toward images with more noise than I might have expected from a high-definition image; however, other titles, such as Ultraviolet, were sharp and eye-catching. (My experience with HD DVD was similarly mixed, with an opposite tilt.) Nonetheless, compared with their standard-definition versions, these high-def films generally showed a marked improvement…In The Fifth Element, when Leeloo dives off a futuristic New York skyscraper, you can see more depth and detail as she plunges into the swarm of airborne cars. Later in that scene, Bruce Willis’s facial hair is clearly visible, not a smudged shadow as you find in the standard-definition version of the film.

Still, the money quote comes from Andy Parsons of the Blu-ray Disc Association, who has apparently backed down from his earlier proclamation that it was ” pretty clear which format is likely to prevail ,” now saying that the deciding factor will probably be “how many new titles are coming out on a regular basis, and how much we can convince people that this stuff is better than standard DVD.” Well, with features like being able to count the hairs in Bruce Willis’s stubble, who isn’t convinced?

[via Digital World ]