One of my favourite TV shows, Castle, began its fourth season yesterday and today it appeared in iTunes to purchase a Season Pass. My big dilemma has been whether I should buy the Standard Definition version like the last three seasons, or buy it in High Definition this year. I now have a larger TV, so I'm sure it'll look great in HD. Also, this season it's only $12 more for HD. I don't know if the lower prices this year (last year was $45 for an SD Season Pass, and only $28 this year) are because they simply want to drum up sales, or because it's planned to be a shorter season. Hopefully, the former. It's a great show.
But there's a lot of debate out there over whether or not iTunes' HD videos should technically even be called HD. Or to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” With a full 1080p HD video, you get six to seven times the number of pixels compared to 480p SD video1. In contrast, the 720p videos you'll find in the iTunes store and many other online video services only have 2-3x pixels2. That's a considerable difference. Granted, any 720p videos I've seen (such as Netflix' HD streams) still look nice, but if I'm shelling out an extra dollar or so per episode for HD video, I'd rather get full HD.
Also, even with 1080p there's still a big difference between what you might find online and what you'd get by buying a Blu-ray Disc instead. A BD has a considerable amount of space on it for storing extra data, so in addition to the high resolution the picture has an increased bit rate (meaning even more detail in the picture) plus higher quality sound. When my brother bought a BD player to replace his dead DVD player—and he doesn't have an HD TV yet so he couldn't compare image quality—his first comment was how much better the audio quality was when comparing the BD and DVD of the same movie. Someone who's downloading a video isn't going to want to wait hours (or even days) to watch it, so audio and video quality has to be sacrificed to make for a more manageable download. But since modern encoding methods can get an SD video to an acceptable file size without significantly compromising quality compared to the DVD, choosing an SD video file over the DVD doesn't have the same loss in quality compared to HD files versus Blu-ray Discs. If you want HD video, you're far better off getting a Blu-ray.
Fortunately for me, I'm used to watching SD TV shows. True, the picture isn't as sharp and detailed as with my Blu-ray movies, but I don't seem to notice as much when it's a TV show and not a movie. I'm slowly upgrading my movie collection to Blu-ray when I find good sales on them (I'm hesitant to pay more than $5-10 to re-buy a movie, unless it's one I really like and have gotten my money's worth out of the DVD already), but I'm perfectly happy having DVD-quality TV shows. Well, part of that is because I like ripping my TV shows into my computer to watch via my Apple TV, which I couldn't do with a Blu-ray because I don't have a BD reader for my Mac.
But back to Castle. Since all my TV shows (aside from some newer Anime purchases) are in SD, and as I said I haven't had any complaints with the image quality even on my new TV, I think it's safe to save the $12 and stick with the SD Season Pass. Maybe I can use part of what I'd save to instead buy Barbie: Princess Charm School! Uh, yeah, no thanks...
11080p video has a resolution of 1920x1280, or 2,073,600 pixels. 480p video is either 640x480 (307,200 pixels) or 720x480 (345,600 pixels). Technically, widescreen 480p video is displayed at 854x480 resolution, but it's only stored at one of the other two resolutions and is stretched horizontally when displayed.
2720p video has a resolution of 1280x720 (921,600 pixels).
1 comment:
I always seem to end up with the same dilemma and also end up buying the SD!
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