“We’re the best!”, “Recommended by so-and-so”, “Number one in such-and-such”. We are probably all pretty well conditioned to ignore the general and obvious bull crap the PR and advertising divisions of many major companies bombard you with day-in and day-out through a multitude of different mediums. Televisions, billboards, advertisements in stores and on the radio, etc. Basically the general plan of any advert is to lie as much as possible without actually doing so just to sell the product. They will portray the most extreme version of whatever it is they are trying to sell to make it seem worth the usually high price of whatever it is they are selling. Good examples are some camera and/or car commercials which feature nothing but an extremely beautiful female model posing for 95% of the runtime. Then there is the most prime example, Herbal Essences, which goes to the extent of suggesting “orgasmic” reactions to their products when anyone with a brain cell knows shampoo doesn’t cause such pleasure. Well at least not in practical use. But what I am specifically here to talk about is one company and one product in particular – Sony and Blu-Ray.
Working in the electronics department of Target, I get bombarded with ads every day for hours on end. My two favorite displays are those put up by Sony, and that is the Blu-Ray display as well the PS3 display screen. I have sat around long enough to hear the advertising evolve as the format war has come to a close and the console war has started to trudge to a crawl. But before we delve into that let us move the clock back two years.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are at each other’s throats. HD-DVD has been beating Blu-Ray in everything but advertising. Cheaper players, cheaper movies, and faster read speeds. At the time the only thing Blu-Ray had over HD-DVD was double the capacity and a marketing division run by Sony which has obviously wiped the floor with Toshiba and Universal/Microsoft, but that isn’t the real reason that the what seems to be obvious choice lost the battle. It was the PS3’s built-in Blu-Ray drive that won the technology the place it has today. Not only was it a multimedia device (and Sony advertised it as one), but it played HD media and games from previous consoles. And all this was actually offered at the low premium of $600. This was comparable to the HD-DVD players at the time which did nothing but play HD-DVD movies and normal DVD’s as well as a bargain in more than one way compared to the $1100 Blu-Ray stand-alone players of 2006-7.
Now we all know if you want someone to buy into a new technology you have to do everything possibly to force it into their hands, even if that means losing some sales to those with a phobia of early adoption. The PS3 did that, and did it through the gaming market as well as the media center market. The PS3 sold to gamers who honestly didn’t care what the games were on as well as sold to video and audiophiles who wanted the biggest and baddest thing for their precious entertainment centers. HD-DVD wasn’t doing anything beyond a $250 HD-DVD add-on for the 360 which, while cheap, performed pretty poorly. Maybe this war would have turned out different if the X-Box 360 had launched with a built-in HD-DVD drive, but alas it is too late for such speculation and hindsight doesn’t help.
To move on from the brief history of the format war we will now delve into the history of Blu-Ray and Sony advertising and it’s wonderful evolution throughout the last few years. At target we still carry one of the older Blu-Ray advertisements. Now this thing is smart as hell. It has some of the most clever verbiage I have ever heard from an advertisement team which avoids almost every possible issue with comparing itself to similar media such as HD-DVD. The entire video is only a comparison of Blu-Ray vs. DVD, calling out fifty times the storage space, amazing 7.1 uncompressed (which is better… yeah… better) surround sound and a huge clarity difference between DVD and itself! WOW! I’m sold!
Ok well I bet you all think this sounds like nothing special or bad in any way. Problem is they aren’t advertising to people who know about the technology, but the people that don’t. First thing I will address from following this horrible format from the start is the “Fifty times the storage space of a normal DVD”. Blu-Ray discs can hold 25Gb on a single layer and, much like DVD’s, can have two layers which is considered a dual layered disc. So if we have a dual layered Blu-Ray disc we naturally would then have 50Gb of information storage. That is without a doubt a lot. No question it is an amazing amount of storage. Now a single layer DVD by itself can hold 4.7Gb and a dual layer DVD can hold 9.4GB. That is one hell of an improvement. So, if we multiply 4.7 by 50 we get… uh oh. I think Sony’s a bit off cause fifty DVD’s wouldn’t fit inside of a Blu-Ray disc even if you got the Hulk to smash them in there for you.
I mean sure, you can argue that it is just an advertisement, but the white lies don’t stop there. Their “uncompressed audio” sounds like it would be better, especially in their illustration about compressed audio being “squeezed or compressed” into a smaller space. Sure, when you compress the sound the file gets smaller, but the waveform (that little up and down line that you see when you look at audio tracks) doesn’t compress too, not unless you use a really shitty compressor. The thing is that bigger storage isn’t always better, just like bigger files isn’t always better. Compressions has been being developed since computers were born. Floppy, CD, DVD, all of these have used some form of compression in audio or video.
Compression is not some evil gremlin who steals quality from everything it touches, all it does is re-arrange the information in the file to a more manageable size. One article even put it taking a sound track similar to this: 10010001101000100, and turning it into this 1__1___11_1___1__. They removed all the zeros. Now, it must sound different since half the code is missing, but what the compression format does is tell whatever is reading the file to put the 0’s back in where they were taken out, replicating the exact same sound as the original file. The best part isn’t that Sony lied to you about compression, but that most studios compress their audio despite using Blu-Ray just so they can utilize the entire disc for more productive things such as special features, developer commentaries, digital copies, etc. This is without a doubt the biggest cherry on top of the BS Sundea in the advertisement, and this advert is over a year old!
The last part of that advertisement is the claim of significant difference between a DVD’s appearance on an HDTV vs Blu-Ray’s HD format on the same television. When I looked at the comparison shot it looked like I had forgot my glasses at home for the DVD portion (I don’t wear glasses by the way). But then I realized they were doing another little white lie. They were comparing a DVD without up-conversion to a Blu-Ray disc. Up-conversion basically adds in extra pixels to make the DVD look HD quality. Not perfect, but far from horrid. Almost every normal DVD player today has up-conversion, and many now have HDMI (an HD audio/video output) or component cables to push up even further. And if you do want to watch HD and get the most out of it, you would most likely have to go 32″ or 42″, maybe larger, before really being able to tell the difference between upscaled DVD and HD media at correct viewing distances. Funny the things they don’t tell you, eh?
So that is what Sony’s advertising was like over a year ago, now it has gone to a whole new level with the death of HD-DVD. The advertisements call it the “perfect” HD media and that “there has never been anything like it, ever”. Hang on a minute. What happened to HD-DVD. Just because you beat them in the format war doesn’t mean they never existed! Honestly, Sony’s arrogance goes beyond me. Especially in the PS3 advertisements. For example, one of the PS3 ads shows an empty field and suddenly hundreds upon thousands of sunflowers (a flower not native to Japan) grow up from the ground. The camera then zooms in on one as it blooms, showing amazing detail while the narrator describes how the amazing Cell processor inside the PS3 can calculate so fast that it can render amazing visuals in real time, obviously using the demonstration of the flowers as a representation of what it can do.
Wrong, because no matter how fast your processor is if you do not have a graphics card (the thing that actually does the rendering of images on the screen for you to see) capable of such a feat your processor power doesn’t matter. Not only that, but they even over-glorify things games have been doing for years! The video continues on to a game moving in slow motion. The game has a few enemies, a few good guys and a grenade going off while some buildings get damaged from gunfire. The narrator continues to talk, “the Cell can calculate everything from each individual bullet’s trajectory and speed up to the artificial intelligence of each individual character on the screen all at the same time.” Well doesn’t that sound like a hundred and fifty pounds of awesome just slapped me in the face with my description. Best part is they are saying the same thing. Sony thinks they can sell you on vocabulary alone.
I know that Sony is not the only PR nightmare to deal with. We have Apple and their “kick them while they’re down” advertising, Microsoft with those crazy 360 commercials which show the gamers inside their own heads, etc. But my point here is that Sony goes the extra mile. Why? Because the general consensus in Japanese business is that Americans are stupid. Yep, thats right. They tried to pass off pre-rendered footage as gameplay in 2006, why not bullshit us into buying Blu-Ray and PS3’s also? And they are right, we are stupid. Cause we believed them, and for a good amount of time, too. And we are continuing to do so despite the number of lies they have piled up over the last few years. I love Sony, I love their products, I just hate their arrogance almost as much as I hate their customer service.
