Audio Video News

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced the first three 50GB, dual-layer Blu-ray Discs. We're practically soaking in the first one, as the Adam Sandler comedy Click, which will be on store shelves this Tuesday, is indeed the first 50GB title. Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down will be the second, arriving on November 14th, and that will be followed by the day-and-date with DVD release of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby on December 12th.

While Blu-ray has been touted since its inception as superior to the competing HD DVD format due to the 50GB data capacity of its dual-layer discs, all of the BDs released so far have been single-layer, 25GB discs (opposed, ironically, to the good number of 30GB dual-layer HD DVD discs that were available at that format's launch).

In addition, most of the discs released by Sony and some of the other Blu-ray studios have used bit hungry MPEG-2 video compression and uncompressed PCM audio, which is also space intensive. While it's well known that the Samsung BD-P1000, the only currently available BD player, is defective with respect to its video quality, one wonders if the combination of single-layer discs with these data intensive audio and video coding schemes isn't partly to blame as well for the generally mediocre video quality Blu-ray has exhibited thus far. And if so, maybe the availability of 50GB discs is the tonic. Besides, what's the point of having a new format if you're not going to re-master everyone of your catalog titles three or four times anyway?

While many of the early Blu-ray titles were light on extra features these first three 50GB titles are fairly loaded with commentaries, deleted scenes, interviews and featurettes. However, as the press release reads, while many of these features (especially on the newer titles, Click and Talladega Nights) are presented in high-definition video they come across as HD versions of what we've seen on DVD. HD DVD so far is simply doing a better job of providing interactivity features that are truly beyond what DVD could offer. For stellar examples see the "In-Movie Experience" feature from The Bourne Supremacy and the U-Control features set from the recently released The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Nevertheless, the availability of 50GB Blu-ray should mean the gloves are coming off as we roll into the holiday season. In addition, Blu-ray players form Sony, Panasonic, and Pioneer are scheduled to arrive between now and the end of the year as well. It's time to see what Blu-ray's really got under the hood!