DVDs, high definition, and wedding videos

Originally published Feb 18, 2008

There has been a lot of press lately regarding the imminent demise of Toshiba's HD-DVD format for high definition DVDs. The entire war between HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-Ray format wasn't good for the industry, as consumers were not interested in purchasing the next Betamax. Wedding videographers have been following this closely. Many have invested in high definition equipment, but have only been delivering standard definition to their clients due to the fact that few had purchased either a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player.

Hopefully this will change. Toshiba is about to cease production of HD-DVD. Netflix and Blockbuster are only renting Blu-Ray. Best Buy and Walmart have announced that they will exclusively carry Blu-Ray from now on. The only thing in the way of mass adoption by the public is the high price of Blu-Ray players. It is hard to find one for less than $350, where an HD-DVD player can be had for $150. The Sony Play Station 3 has a built in Blu-Ray drive, but it isn't the most popular game console.

Standard definition DVDs look very good on high definition televisions. With an upsampling DVD player (available for under $100), the quality is very good, not quite HD, but close enough for most people. If you have a really big 1080p television (over 50 inches), you will see a significant difference. If you have a smaller set, you may not. TVs are getting bigger though. I bought a 32 inch set 2 1/2 years ago for about $2000. That will get you a television twice as large these days.

So what does this mean for delivering wedding video on HD? I believe that in the future as prices drop on Blu-Ray, it will become the norm. There are those who don't think that high def DVDs will ever catch on, that online delivery will take over. The problem with using the Internet is that the enormous bandwidth required for HD video may not be available. Also there is a significant portion of the population who still does not have broadband Internet.

Also people like to have something tangible. If everyone just wanted to rent movies, stores like BestBuy wouldn't be stocking so many DVDs.

Since a wedding video is a keepsake, most couples would prefer to have a disk to keep. DVDs will be around a long time. As long as Blu-Ray catches on, it will too.

Our plan is to deliver both standard DVD and Blu-Ray in the future. This will allow our clients to watch their wedding on any DVD player, and also have a high definition copy to view on Blu-Ray.

By the way, lest you think of me as a Blu-ray fanboy, I bought an HD-DVD player in December. At least I didn't purchase too many movies. I did get used to watching HD-DVD movies from Netflix. Now I will have to buy a Blu-Ray player to do that.