Now you can watch it all in high definition... except for the stuff that isn't...
I got my dad a PS3 recently, and the first thing he did with it was stuck a “Blu-Ray”1 disc in it. Watched about half of it, then promptly stuck the oldest thing he could find. This was a DVD which was probably copied from a VHS, which was copied from wax tapes, which was in turn written down from dinasour droppings. The thing was a relic, and I fully expected Indiana Jones to rush in screaming "It belongs in a museum".
This was also a disc which had never worked in DVD players. The terrible age, bad workmanship, overuse, and (I personally believe) the sheer age of the content made it unplayable on modern media. It was cracked and chipped in places, and only hope was holding it together. Of course, the PS3 not only played it perfectly, but also upscaled it. The movie itself is only a fragment of what holds it together, as a piece of work. Mostly, it’s the technology which makes it watchable.
High def bugs me, not because I mind the technology, but because I know how it’s going to be used: for watching up-scaled old movies, and that makes me sad. Today, with 5 HD channels on free-to-air television, not one is showing HD content. Worse, one is showing a movie that’s probably as old as the one my dad was watching. Having 5 speakers all blaring out the exact same thing, at full volume, having 2 Megapixels of data, mostly showing noise. The standard def channel is showing an old western. On another channel, Elvis. It breaks my heart.
It’s also the principal reason I don’t like supercars, because they’re often driven by old 'tards who no longer know how to drive. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against older people. I have something against someone who hasn’t moved with the times, who wants to make things like they were in the old days, and even 20 year olds can be like that. It adds a terrible sting to every new technology: because it often doesn’t herald the future, it heralds the past.
1 As an aside, I hate the term “Blu-Ray”, because “Blu” is a mis-spelled “Blue”. If it was “Blue-Ray”, I might be a bit nicer to it, but only just. I liked HD-DVD purely because of it’s nicer naming. Hopefully “BD” will take over as the canonical naming for the discs.