Saturday, July 15, 2006

   HAHA! I saw it this coming a mile away!


For those of us who have an ounce of common sense and skinny wallets, we could see the UMD format for movies was an utter failure. Sony just can’t win at formats. I dub thee, Beta-Max Curse! They officially stopped making movies for UMD

Basically UMD was a kooky looking disc that Sony developed to play games, movies, music and all that other stuff. For the most part the games didn’t have any problems selling on the UMD format (d’uh) but movies sold poorly.

Not considering any of the limitations you have with the UMD technology…it was doomed to fail. Take this scenario.

You’re in a store. You want to pick-up a movie you want that was just released. Well, as a PSP owner, you have two options. A DVD or UMD. If you get the UMD, you can watch the movie pretty much anywhere so long as you have your PSP, but man, that’s one tiny screen! What about a DVD? You can watch it at home, on your computer, anywhere so long there is a monitor and a compatible player.

So your options are a movie you can only watch on your PSP or a movie you can watch on a more than one system?

But wait there’s more! Because of the size limitations of the UMD disk…you only get the movie! No spiffy bonus features or alternate tracks, where as your DVD comes with all kinds of spiffy stuff…most of the time…

It seemed obvious to me that was a STUPID idea. Whatever. So now Sony is planning on releasing “Media Packs” or whatever…basically some kind of stick medium…only compatible with their Sony brand cameras, video cams and of course the PSP. Sony, Sony, Sony. WHY DON’T YOU EVER LEARN?

Excuse me while I laugh at their next ridiculous venture..

For the life of me though, I don’t understand the appeal for portable movies. Personally, I’d only want a portable movie for long trips trips/vacations. But, if you have the dough you can mount monitors in your vehicle and do the setup for a DVD player or chunk down the cash for a portable player… even that doesn’t seem worth it to me. For daily commutes, any hardware like a PSP or a portable DVD player seems to be too expensive for me to tote to work/school/etc. Also, the length of movies….a normal Hollywood film is 1 and half to 2 hours long. I like to watch a movie in one sitting… not 20 minutes there or half an hour there… Of course there’s always television series or anime series on DVD…but again…I’m afraid of loosing them or having them stolen. In car traveling, you always run the risk of heat damage to your disks as well. I’d much rather leave my gems, safe and sound at home.

Why not just turn to books, music and games instead?

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