HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Question

Movie "masters" are either on film - which is much higher-rez than DVD, or they're in digital, also in much higher rez than DVD.

Some movie theaters already have digital projectors. The resolution of these is also much higher than DVD. If you have a 20-foot-high screen, then a single pixel in DVD rez is 240" / 480 pixels = 1/2 inch. Since you've never seen big half-inch blocks in a movie theater, its a safe bet that they're already using something comparable to (or more likely, better than) HD-DVD.

The only environment that hasn't yet received HD-quality video is the home video market. This is partly due to cost, and partly due to Hollywood paranoia - they don't want consumers to be able to make a reproduction that is so good, it's indiscernible from the original.

If you have good eyes, sit near the TV, or use a very large screen (e.g. projector), you can pretty easily see the pixels in an SDTV image. That's true whether it's from DVD or elsewhere. The market is just trying to reduce this quality shortcoming in home entertainment.

Film-based originals should be significantly higher than HD 1080p quality. Digital originals are also (usually) higher than or (infrequently) equal to HD 1080p quality - though I don't know exactly how much higher. Given the math on pixel size for a 20' screen, I would think they'd need at least 2000 (100 pixels per foot), perhaps as many as 5000 pixels vertical resolution to provide a sufficiently smooth image at that size.

I've seen 1080 HD-level content in a movie theater, in the form of a series of adverts before the film. It wasn't bad, but I could definitely distinguish the pixels from the middle of the theater (I have pretty good eyesight). The subsequent film had to be at a much higher resolution - or on film - because I could no longer distinguish the pixels.

The exception to all of this would be low-grade or low-budget movies. I believe Blair Witch was filmed with a consumer SD camcorder, for example.

100 ISO 35 mm photograpic film is rougly equivalent to a resolution of 2,000 by 3,000 pixels. Perhaps 70mm movie film would be something like 2,000 by 5,000 in equivalent computer pixel resolution.

This is just a rough estimate...

See these articles about film resolution:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/ [...] tout.shtml
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagede [...] mary1.html