Well, I just finally got to see Blu-Ray demonstrated to me for the very first time... sigh... the much-ballyhooed new format is a tremendous disappointment.
It certains crisps up images, all right -- too crisp. Every film clip shown on it, both live-action and animated, was so digitized that all smooth images were as jagged and pixelated as an Atari 5200, and all the the color hues, including skin tones and deliberate smudges, were blocky and giving the impression of being out of an '80s videogame as opposed to being solid. Neither myself nor five other individuals present could enjoy what was being presented. Objects which were supposed to be far off in the distance fared even worse, being blocked up to the point of complete unrecognizability.
Photographic and animated visuals simply do not benefit from being broken down into such sharp pixels that they no longer form coherent pictures and cause a problem with the normally pleasurable act of simply looking at a movie or show.
