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Blu-ray porn - are we there yet?
Filed under Tech Talk :: Posted on May 9, 2008
After buying a PlayStation 3 back in January, my Blu-ray movie collection has been growing steadily. On a HDTV of a decent size, the quality of good Blu-ray transfer is in an entirely different league than DVD, which of course it should be, otherwise this whole HD craze would just be a major marketing gimmick (ehh… alright, I guess that technically we couldn’t entirely put such a stunt past Hollywood and the electronics companies, but fortunately hi-def really does deliver on its promises).
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But what about Blu-ray porn then? At this time I’ve reviewed a fairly decent selection of sites offering downloadable HD porn videos (check out my Technology Leaders list), but as I mentioned in my previous blog post about HD porn the modest typically 4000 kbit (occasionally 5-8000) bitrate really doesn’t fare entirely well when you decide to view your downloaded porn on your large HDTV, rather than a typical 17-22″ PC monitor.
Sure, it certainly looks decent enough, but it’s lacking that remarkable clarity and abundance of fine detail you get with Blu-ray movies, which tops out a bitrate ten times higher than those 4000 kbit used on downloadable porn.
So what do those of us more or less obsessed with video quality do to get our real HD porn fix? Well, frankly not a whole lot just yet. I’ve been around the net looking for Blu-ray porn, and the selection is still extremely slim - although now that Blu-ray has recently won the HD format war over HD DVD, hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll see a number of large porn studios releasing Blu-ray porn. Quite a few have no doubt been shooting in HD for a while - now they just need to make the same move for the rest of their production (alongside regular DVD releases of course, those aren’t going anywhere for years).
For those of you who want to join the very early adopters, Digital Playground currently has 15 Blu-ray porn releases, which can be ordered directly from their site. Here’s a direct link to their Blu-ray page.
You can also find many (if you can really use that word about such a limited collection) of their releases - plus some from a few other studios - in some of the large adult online shops, including (again direct Blu-ray links) GameLink and The Sex Superstore.
One final note though, until I’ve actually gotten my hands on a few Blu-ray porn movies (ordering overseas can sometimes be a bitch - both in terms of delivery times and customs, but I’ll probably see if I can find a European online store carrying them - or wait till later this year when things are hopefully starting to move forward), I really can’t say for sure how good the video quality is likely to be.
As I mentioned in my previous HD related post, for obvious reasons I’m certainly not expecting porn studios to have quite the same facilities and equipment as a Hollywood studio, but I don’t see any reason why they would have skimped on the bitrate and not offered the best quality they possibly could.
So overall, for large screens I very much expect Blu-ray porn to offer a quality that’s superior to even the best looking downloadable HD porn.
But I guess I’ll find out soon enough.