Is DVD for me?
Oct 07 '00
The DVD wave is here and many people are asking the question, "Should I get a DVD player or not?" There may be more for you to consider before deciding to buy a DVD for your home. The improvement of DVD movies over VHS is astronomical in quality and sound but to take advantage of the improvements you will have to have an up to date stereo amplifier or tuner/amp.
You may also want to check into HD TV. High definition television gives your DVD movies the resolution quality that they deserve. DVD movies are really only limited in resolution by the display that they are viewed on, so if you have an old 19 inch television with the standard resolution you will not get as high quality a picture as you will with a high definition television. You will however, have better picture and sound than your VCR could ever provide.
DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc and they are not just used for movies although that is what they are mainly used for. DVD's can have data on them that you can access with your computer if you have a DVD drive on your computer. Some of the newer DVD players can read MP3 file format as well as CD audio on CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable discs. This is great to replace a current CD player because you will have more media you can use on the DVD player. For example, if you want to play a music CD just put it in and hit the play button. If you burn a CD with MP3 music files on it, you can get over 3 hours of music on a CD at a decent sound quality instead of the 74 minutes (or 80 minutes on some CDR discs) limited by CD audio format. If the DVD player you get can read the MP3 file format, you can play these MP3 CD's on your DVD just as simple as playing a regular audio CD.
The real attraction of a home DVD player is the digital sound. In order to take advantage of the digital sound, you must have a stereo that has digital in and digital out. You should also have a good set of digital speakers, preferably surround speaker for movies and concerts. So, there is a little more involved than just buying a DVD. You can plug most DVD players into an existing stereo and television with coaxial input, but you won't get the real power of your DVD unless you have a full digital environment for it. It still is worth the purchase (in my opinion) for the ability to freeze frames without any distortion, the ability to instantly go back to the beginning of movies, the ability to read multi-media, (DVD, DVD-R, CD, CDR, CDRW) which most DVD players are capable of now.
If the DVD player you buy is capable of reading DVD-R or DVD-Recordable discs, you can get a DVD-Recordable drive for your computer and put your home movies on DVD, using MPEG2 compression, for safe keeping and to share with others. Yes, you could do that with CD's also but CD's only hold a fraction of the data or space that a DVD disc can hold. CD's hold a maximum of 650MB (or 700MB on some discs) of data space while DVD's can hold up to 17GB of data storage. In other words, if you have 10-20 VHS home videos, you could put almost your entire collection of home video on a DVD-R disc using the right amount of compression and the right writing method.
I hope this review helps you if you're deciding whether or not to join the DVD wave. Thanks for reading.
:-) Gr8ful
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