FRED MANTEGHIAN BLOG

Somebody slap me, I must be having a nightmare. Didn't we just go through a format war? Didn't Toshiba just get the living crap beat out of them trying to push the HD DVD format down the throats of a world that thinks a) Sony is better (who knew you could get so much mileage out of "Trinitron") and b) people prefer blue disc cases to red ones (no really!).

Perhaps there were some other issues involved, but if you ask me, those were the major ones.

Toshiba is convinced that their upconverting DVD players are now the answer to their our problems, not blu-ray. I guess high-def was only important if we were smoking out of their pipe. But you can almost forgive Toshiba their attitude. They'll need some time to lick their wounds (and some privacy – ouch!).

But what about a high end audio / video distribution system company like Kaleidescape? Why are they trying to upconvert DVDs to provide "a viewing experience that rivals Blu-ray." Why not, oh, I don't know, use Blu-ray instead???

These whole home distribution systems are not cheap, not by a long shot. And the people who buy them? Well let's put it this way, they wouldn't blink twice if gas was $4 per liter which, oops - sorry Europe, I guess it is over there, but hey, you've got good beer, so we'll call it even, okay? My point is, for the price difference between regular DVDs and BD discs, i don't think Kal's customers are going to complain. In the meantime, for only the cost of TEN Sony PS3 game consoles slash blu-ray players, you can buy the Kaleidescape player and for another TEN G's, get into an entry level system. Fill 'er up and throw me a few of those blu-ray scented air fresheners why dontcha.

Granted, storing 480p movies on a file server and then upconverting them at playback to 1080p is going to be much easier on your hard drive than throwing down for a 1080p original, but please Kaleidescape, spare us the fiction you've "achieved our goal of producing beautiful high definition video from the DVDs that we've all been collecting for years."

Really, is that what we've been doing? We've actually been collecting high-definition video all these years? Who knew? The whole format war could have been averted. That's the problem with bad intelligence. It gets around.