Can anyone actually TELL the difference between Blu-ray/HD-DVD over DVD?

[dLee]

I see now. You mean sloppy-made discs. Not the tech or anything, but the people doing the work. If you want to see truly awful DVDs, look at Thundercats, Married With Children, Leave It To Beaver, Garfield & Friends, and latter Pokemon box sets. Grainy, noisy, overly-compressed.

...and unnecessary (the grainy, noisy, overly-compressed part).

[Ollie6431]

I can't tell if I'm being mocked or defended LOL. I honestly just wondered if anyone else couldn't tell a noticable difference... It was just an honest question. I thought that if everyone else could that maybe I had things set up wrong and people could help me get it right.

Welcome to the forum! I don't think anyone tried to mock or defend your observation. Most of the times, the remarks actually were referred to comments by others, not directly at you. Besides, the reality is that most of us including myself (except for a few) do not even have a "killer system" like yours and may not be even in a better position to see more than what you did.
Since the opinions from other forum users are vastly varied and you have invested in a top-of-the-line system, it would be good to get the best out of your system by getting the connection correctly. Visting home-theater shops (as edDV suggested), in particular the ones that you made most purchases from, for advice would be the best thing to do. It is possible that you have not seen the true high-def capacity of the system.
I am sure that most of us would be interested in what you find out. Please share the resullts with us when you do.

[davideck]

Sharpness is largely determined by the anti-aliasing of the film/digital transfers (down from film or pro HD, to DVD). For example, my ATI All In Wonder cards have sharper 352x480 than some cheap DVD recorders and cheap capture cards do at 720x480.

It's really a combination of factors that causes ANYTHING in video to actually happen.

This is why myths like "my DVD died" or "HD is better than SD" or"352x480 is softer than 720x480" are bullcrap.

Resolution is not as much about sharpness or softness as it is about detail level. Any resolution can be filtered to look sharp or soft, but a given detail level requires a proportional minimum resolution. More detail requires more pixels. This is a fundamental constraint before the other stuff matters.

As an example, when my local News programming displays its Web Home Page, the HD image appears in full detail as if viewed on a PC Monitor, while the small characters in the SD image are indiscernible. You can sharpen the SD image all you want, but the small characters will not come into focus like they are in the HD image. The detail is simply not there. And even though some characters may be indiscernible, the SD image may still look sharper than the HD image.

All HD images do not contain this much detail, but for as long as I have been watching, things have been improving. As of now, I still see a random mix of HD sources and SD sources in many HD programs. I see HD Keying over SD Backgrounds. I see massive amounts of artifacts on some programs. No wonder there is confusion. But I think it will improve. The potential is there. These things take time.

As for BluRay/HD-DVD releases, they may have to improve as well.

While I see HD improving, I also notice a decline in SD channel quality. Some of them look like poor downconversions of bit starved HD channels; all the artifacts with less resolution.