Digital Home Thoughts: This is Not the Way to Show Off HD-DVD

One of the big releases for the HD-DVD platform, and indeed I think one of it s most significant wins, is finally here: the HD-DVD release of the original Star Trek series. You can be sure that ST:TNG and the other chapers in the Star Trek universe won't be too far behind. Star Trek fans, myself included, have shown that they're willing to pay ridiculous prices to own the DVD box sets (I still can't believe I paid those ridiculous prices!), and I suspect we'll see some of these same people now adopting HD-DVD as their platform of choice now that Star Trek is coming out in that format. I sure won't be buying it at the $218 USD price though!. I was curious to see how good the quality was, because while I know film is quite "high resolution", we're talking about some very old footage here. I was pleased to see a link offering a "Preview of Star Trek HD DVD - Season One". Clicking it, this is what I saw:



The choices on the player are Quicktime 56K (dial-up) and 300K broadband, and the same for Windows Media Player (56K and 300K). What? How is that an HD-DVD preview in any way, shape, or form? You can see by the screen shot that I picked the 300K WMV stream, and I got a whopping 164K/s of data. That size of preview (256 x 192 pixels) is something I'd expect to see in 2002, not nearing the end of 2007. Come on Paramount, where's the quality preview of the quality we'd see by dropping $217 USD on this package? Where's the big and glorious 1280 x 720 clip, or even a 1920 x 1080 clip? Show us how good this really will look, and maybe we'll buy it...