For millions of consumers who bought high-definition television sets over the holidays, there has been one major disappointment: DVD movies often look worse than they did on their old TVs.
I call it the "plastic surgery" effect. It's an artifact of converting a movie from a medium designed for the best picture possible on standard TV screens, with 480 horizontal lines of resolution, to HDTV sets, with 720 or 1024 lines. Whatever you call it, the process may actually eliminate some detail, particularly from human faces, making them look like they've had one tuck too many.
Now that consumers are used to the high quality of true HD broadcasts, they're getting tired of subpar movies and asking if it's time to upgrade to the new generation of high-definition DVD players.
The answer is "no."
Certainly not until the industry resolves a stupid war over competing and incompatible high-definition DVD formats - a fight that's playing out like the Betamax versus VHS videotape battle of the 1980s.
For the time being, you can spend a lot less and improve the display of your current movie collection by picking up an inexpensive, standard DVD player that performs a trick called "upconversion." More about that later.
Just so you'll know who's on the current DVD fight card, in one corner is a group led by Sony and Matsushita (parent of Panasonic). It's backing a high-definition DVD standard called Blu-ray. This gang includes all of the major movie studios except Universal, which means they all plan to release DVDs in the Blu-ray format - although not always exclusively.
In the other corner is a group led by Toshiba with the backing of computer industry titans such as Microsoft and Hewlett- Packard, among others. They champion a standard called HD DVD. You'll find lots of movies in HD DVD format, too.
In fact, I predict that most moviemakers with any brains will start releasing titles both ways, as Warner and Paramount are already doing.
Some moviemakers plan to put both versions on the same disk, but it will take a while for that to play out.
In recent weeks, Blu-ray DVD Movie sales have been running ahead of HD DVD, according to industry analysts, but the market is still small and volatile, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
Meanwhile, ignore arguments about the technical merits of Blu-ray versus HD DVD. They both display terrific movies on high-definition TV sets, with greatly improved sound and nifty interactive features. The important question is who wins and who loses. That will be a marketing battle, just like VHS versus Beta.
