Anime in High Def! Blu-ray~HD-DVD

Heh, I think it's going to take a lot more than a year before the new formats outnumber DVD in terms of releases and sales. There was a lot more incentive to upgrade from VHS to DVD, and even then it took DVD something like five years to surpass VHS.

As for anime I think we'll mostly see movies released for now. Cheaper and faster to get out the door, and less risky. A lot of the early digitally animated TV shows were also not created in HD so the question is, who's willing to buy them all over again, when the picture quality isn't going to be that much better? The ones that will benefit from HD the most are actually the older shows that were created using traditional cels, and in recent years several Japanese companies have gone back to create HD masters for many of these (like Outlaw Star, Evangelion, Gundam etc.), but I'm guessing they're going to wait a bit to release those until more people get Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players.

How ya doing, buddy?

Like has already been mentioned, it will be a complete waste to put out things like Naruto in hi-def, but movies and shows like Ghost in the Shell and Stand Alone Complex will certainly benefit from it, and will look sharper and more detailed (not brighter!).

Regarding the question of space, if the content is encoded in HD then the episode/disc ratio will not be that much better than it is with DVD now. Yes, there's more room on the disc, but the episodes will also take up more space due to higher bitrates so it kind of evens out.* You don't see the Hollywood studios put five movies onto one Blu-Ray/HD-DVD disc either.

As for the usefulness of HD, that is for everyone to decide for themselves, but of course you're not going to have any use of it on your 15-year-old 22" tube TV. Many people had the exact same "don't fix what ain't broken" arguments to stay with VHS back in the day, just know that HD is the future and there's no getting around it. It's the inevitable evolution of technology, and if these new formats fail, then something else will come along instead.

And in case people have forgotten, you couldn't exactly find players for $50 when DVD had just been released either. No one's expecting the masses to jump on the bandwagon from day 1, these things take time.



*It depends on what type of disc and what bitrate you use, and while you could probably squeeze in some more episodes due to more efficient codecs, you're never going to see an entire 26-ep show in HD on one disc.

There's nowhere I can't reach.