In the here and now, Blu-Ray is king for both image quality ceteris paribus if you have a screen that is large enough to show the difference. There are studies on the Web that examine our ability to discern pixel pitch. On a small screen, the pixels are very small and you need to sit close enough to see. However the original poster noted that the typical recommendation is 3x the diagonal. This is with respect to filling one's field of view with the screen. At that distance, the pixel pitch on a 50 or 60 inch plasma/LCD is too fine to discern. On a 100 inch screen the amount of information does wonders for image detail.
I had what was probably the finest DVD player made, the Levinson No. 51 with custom processing. It far surpassed my Denon 5910 and Esoteric UX1. However, the Pioneer BDP-09fd is simply better on my 110 inch screen. Plus, as another person noted, the sound is much better, essentially CD quality if listening to the higher bitrate streams.
Whether Blu-Ray survives downloads is another thing although given DRM, the confusion of having to store one's own library on HDs (I do so with my thousands of photographs on multiple RAIDs and backups= frustration). Moreover the real vs. promised bandwidth needed for short download times (my highspeed connection says up to 25 Mbps but Ive been getting as low as 3.5 Mbps recently) would indicate that the advent of digital downloads for regular programming may be a ways off yet, esp. since our market is not really reliably high speed let alone other regional markets around the world that are behind the US in internet connectivity.
I had what was probably the finest DVD player made, the Levinson No. 51 with custom processing. It far surpassed my Denon 5910 and Esoteric UX1. However, the Pioneer BDP-09fd is simply better on my 110 inch screen. Plus, as another person noted, the sound is much better, essentially CD quality if listening to the higher bitrate streams.
Whether Blu-Ray survives downloads is another thing although given DRM, the confusion of having to store one's own library on HDs (I do so with my thousands of photographs on multiple RAIDs and backups= frustration). Moreover the real vs. promised bandwidth needed for short download times (my highspeed connection says up to 25 Mbps but Ive been getting as low as 3.5 Mbps recently) would indicate that the advent of digital downloads for regular programming may be a ways off yet, esp. since our market is not really reliably high speed let alone other regional markets around the world that are behind the US in internet connectivity.