I think it would be a mistake to ignore the large number of very good HD camcorders, which shoot in 1440x01080. That's pretty much the standard for HDV shooting. It scales nicely to 1920x1080 with the replication of every 3rd horizontal pixel or to 1280x720 by dropping every 9th horizontal pixel. In quality tests I've seen, there is a much larger difference in image quality between 1440x1080 vs 1920x1080 camcorders associated with sensors (3x vs 1x), lenses, codecs and bitrates. I certainly can't see any advantage of 1280x720 over 1440x1080, except maybe smaller file sizes.
In general, I think the 1440x1080 vs 1920x1080 debate is about as meaningful as the 6mp vs 8mp debate was. There is a theoretical difference, but it's not something that you'll notice in real world usage.
I agree mostly - but the fact remains, only 1280x720 and 1920x1080 are "correct" high-definition resolutions. (Unlike digital cameras, where there is no standard size.) I personally would rather wait until 1920x1080 ones become more or less standard (in the same way that 1080P televisions are finally becoming pretty common) rather than getting an in-between solution. Similarly, a lot of nice TVs have 1366x768 resolution - but I wouldn't buy one.
1280x720p would be superior to 1440x1080i I would suspect, 1440x1080p would be better but again you're getting a stretched image. Imagine if a DSLR was released with an oddball resolution like that.
As for HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray debate, I would ignore it for camcorders. There aren't any camcorders that capture directly to either format that you actually want. Besides, just about anyone serious enough to drop $1,000 on an HD camcorder is likely to also be serious enough to at least minimally edit their footage. If that's the cast, then the capture and playback formats need not be the same.
I agree 100%. Forget that terminology completely when shopping for a high-def camcorder.
And as I mentioned earlier, you most certainly can put high-def content on a regular DVD, just less of it. I haven't been following it very closely, but my understanding is that BluRay players are pretty good at playing back AVCHD or transport stream high-def from homemade DVDs, and I think Nero can burn an HD-DVD format onto a standard DVD (definitely not sure about this one, but I believe that's the case.) There's nothing magical about BluRay/HD-DVD discs themselves, they just hold more data.
As for downloading movies off the internet - I don't think it'll ever catch on. First off, the big killer is that would put an enormous strain on the internet itself, and the backbone carriers likely won't be happy about that. Second, you need a
fast connection to even get DVD-quality video in realtime - on your end, and the host needs to have a pretty enormous pipe to handle many connections grabbing movies. Third, to get high-def content into a format that has a prayer of getting across the internet in realtime, it will need to be heavily compressed. Hardly comparable to a good BluRay with huge bitrate and a big fat DTS 7.1 soundtrack. Fourth, downloads like that are sure to be heavily DRMed and therefore ephemeral - and people like to OWN movies. Even if you could keep them, a good 1080P high-def movie can easily be 15-20 gigs. That's a ton of space even with today's large hard drives. Fifth, consumers have gotten used to nice extras, which would be a tough sell with a streamed movie.
