Any difference between any of the HD formats versus standard DVD playing in a player with a 1080 line upconverter?
Night and day. Upsampled 480p has blocky regions no matter what you do, even with a Faroudja video processor or the ATI/nVidia GPU based cleanup drivers. Real, live 1080p looks like, well, 1080p. No blocks, no strange staticky artifacts. It's crisp and perfect.
Speaking of that, why haven't the prices of dual layer blanks come down much? They've been around now for a while, yet decent quality dual-layer blanks still run around $2. Decent quality single layer blanks can be had for maybe $0.40. I'm guessing Blu-ray prices will remain in the stratosphere for quite some time also.
Several reasons.
1. Low demand. Most people don't even know you can buy them.
2. Poor compatibility. For Video DVDs that were "shrunk" onto 8.5GB disks, there is no software that can manage to put the layer break in the same place as the original disc, resulting in a disc that might not play properly. For that matter, a lot of set top players that support single layer +R discs don't support +R DLs.
3. Poor compatibility (2). For computer data, I was never able to make one that was bootable, and even some DVD burners were kind of hit or miss reading them all the way through without errors.
4. Price fixing. I suspect that media manufacturers and/or electronics companies were offered some kind of incentives by media conglomerates to keep those discs somewhat difficult to obtain. If the discs had become common in the way that regular blanks did, problems 1 -3 probably would've sorted themselves out in short order.
Anyway, the latest word is that Sony expects to release two revisions of the BluRay spec this year. HDDVD has a builtin system to receive firmware updates and therefore new disc specifications. BluRay has no such system, meaning that many thousands (millions?) of set top players won't be able to read updated discs.
If the industry does indeed go BluRay, it made a truly awful choice.
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