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Blu-ray may have won the format war, but that victory doesn’t mean much when the average consumer looks at it and legitimately can’t tell the difference between a Blu-ray and a DVD, or if they can tell the difference and don’t care. HD is a smaller relative leap from DVD than DVD was from VHS - whereas it’s easy to impress upon a potential buyer the change from two-channel analog sound to six-channel digital sound, it’s less so when you’re trying to convince said buyer of the advantages inherent in eight channels instead of six, or 5 Mbps (the average Dolby TrueHD bitrate) instead of 448 kbps (the high end of Dolby Digital 5.1 bitrate).

If you have two gigantic HD screens side-by-side in front of you, with one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-ray, it gets easier to show off the difference. You’re talking about a very controlled environment, though, and hypothesizing that a 32-inch HDTV is going to show any noticeable difference between the two formats. Exacerbating this is the fact that, by 2008, the average DVD player had gotten awfully good with upscaling.

Upscaling is a less-evil manifestation of interpolation; instead of creating artificial frames to smooth motion, it creates artificial lines of resolution to simulate a higher-definition image. At its best, with a properly mastered DVD, upscaling makes it difficult to tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray image unless you possess a very large screen, or unless you’re actively looking for fidelity in fine detail - strands of hair or the texture of fabric.

The Blu-ray format has matured and improved since 2008, and it is still by far the apex predator when the priority is the best audiovisual experience. Obsolescence of the format isn’t here or nearby, but it’s in sight. As of 2015, Blu-ray’s kind-of-sort-of successor has already been announced: Blu-ray 4K, to match up with 4K HDTVs. We will talk more about both of these things in a future installment of Intermittent Issues. Thank you for sticking it out through over 6,000 words with us, and we’ll be back with Part 3 soon.

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