Do you have a preference on what you get movies or TV shows on like:
4K
Blu-Ray
DVD
Or even
VHS tapes
Laserdisc
As for me though I think Blu-Ray has a better picture I don't mind getting DVDs.
I'm starting to get back into getting them again and I got my first Blu-Ray tonight of IMO one of the greatest films of all time The French Connection.
Also have Capt. America: The First Avenger and The Winter Soldier on DVD. The last one I want to get on Blu-Ray.
Had other ones but unfortunately got rid of them and I regret it.
well.... as far as resolution goes, .....DVD in USA/Canada (NTSC areas) has a defined resolution of 720 x 480 pixels (480 lines of horizontal resolution). p = progressive scan. Some video cameras shoot interlaced footage and that is processed differently from progressive scan images.
In PAL regions (like UK etc) a DVD plays video at 720 x 576 pixels.
Movies tend to be FILMED at 24p (24frames per second or actually 23.976fps).
Video cameras in USA often shoot 30p but can give you different frame rates like 24p, 30p, 60p, 120p, or even many different frame-rates. 60p and over is called "overcranking" and is typically used for smooth slow-motion stuff.
So.... DVD cannot play HiDef movies UNLESS it is formatted as a Data DVD and in that case in can hold video files of higher res, but most DVD players won't play it.
Blu-Ray can play movies in 720p and 1080p. AFAIK not higher res than that.
When BluRay was defined... at that time the top-spec was 1080p (1080p = 1080lines of horizontal resolution).
4K is generally 2160p which is 2160 horizontal lines of resolution. The "p" stands for progressive scan (not interlaced scan).
It's very high res and uses a fuckton of bandwidth and you need a very high bitrate (data rate per second) to encode/decode 4K without tons of visual artefacts. Video data rates are usually expressed in Mbps (Mega bits per second).
VHS tapes are quite archaic but they were about the ONLY method of renting or buying movies 20 or 30 years ago. No random-access with tape of course.
Basically video has multiple factors that makes it "look" how it does :
- spatial resolution (horizontal and vertical resolution)
- temporal resolution (frames per second)
- encoding bitrate
- the color depth like 4:2:2, or 4:2:0
- the different codecs used to encode the video (for eg. ProRes is very nice, others are AVCHD, and loads of others and high-end cameras like RED and Arri shoot their own uncompressed (or lightly compressed) codecs which require massive data storage and bandwidth)
OK I've probably bored y'all enough with this and wandered off-topic so....I'll stop.