That's wrong, because Blu-Ray is outpacing DVD's growth at the same point in its life.
I'd not necessarily go as far as making this appear to be so black & white, since product development lifecycles and adoption rates have generally shortened, and as such, its probably appropriate to consider some degree of data normalization before drawing some comparative conclusion. If nothing else, one should consider doing a relative cost/income assessment that includes the Consumer Price Index (CPI), since a $200 BR player today is a lot less in constant dollars than a $200 VHS player or $200 DVD player from their respective historical periods.
You say in your next sentence you are watching on a 720p (1280x720) TV and you're missing more than half the resolution Blu-Ray can give you (1920x1080). You're missing more than 1/2 the pixels (900,000 vs 2,100,000)
This sort of comparison comes up quite a bit in digital photography. Simply put, a 2:1 increase in pixel count does not result in a doubling of resolution: to get a true doubling, it is a ratio of the squares (4:1) because the image has two dimensions (vertical & horizontal). As such, a (0.9MP:2.1MP) ratio only represents a 53% improvement, not a 100%+ one. True, its still not something to turn down, but the point is that the improvement isn't necessarily as dramatic as is being suggested: if you want to literally double the resolution , DVD's ~1MP requires roughly 4MP, and BR's ~2MP wouldn't be doubled until you get to over 8MP.
That is also not true. Yes, you are not experiencing surround sound which is a big part of the experience, I encourage you to get a surround setup and your movie experience will be transformed.
For what
Rodimus said, it is true: his current setup isn't capable of exploiting either improvement in sound level.
However, you are wrong that Blu-Ray won't improve your experience.
Again, BR can improve his experience, but because it cannot do so until more of his current hardware is replaced, you're not addressing his "Here, Now" personal reality.
What both of these are actually hitting on is that the real world consumer's electronics rack isn't necessarily all 100% ready to go for BR from the perspective of being able to immediately see/hear all of BR's improvements.
This is in no small part because the
technology implimentation was modular (TV, Speakers, Player unit, etc), which allows smaller (and smaller $ chunks) incremental improvements over time, but which also acts as a double-edged sword:
On the plus side, a previously purchased incremental improvement will be on hand to immediately exploit its contribution to an upgrade to BR.
On the minus side, this same modular nature permits a consumer to potentially "Never" upgrade every single last item. As such, we can have implimentations where BR is only able to reach 80% of its potential and not anything more, because that last 20% depends on upgrading a subsystem that's been (for whatever reason) not upgraded.
FWIW, the alternative to this is an all-in-one system, but this has its own downside in that since it isn't modular, it is effectively less affordable, since it requires one big chunk of money rather than 3-4 smaller ones. In general, this will delay technology adoption.
Whereas the first DVD Player that I bought ten years ago (1999) would by comparison cost $318 in today's dollars ... as such, should there be any huge surprise that the respective adoption curves are so significantly different?
-hh
