Ben Drawbaugh over at HD Beat got a chance to see a BD (Blu-ray Disc) player demo recently, and he was favourably impressed. The demo was done on a Sony WPL-VW100 projector.

They had a demo of “Lawrence of Arabia” and half the screen was DVD and the other half was HD. It was obviously a better picture quality and it was a more actuate demo than the HD-DVD demo which looked more like SD analog cable vs HD. The only other clip was the “Spider Man 2″ preview. The clarity was awesome and I sat through the demo about 10 times and still wished I could take it home.

I’m pretty sure that any demo of HD DVD or BD players will be quite impressive. They’re both HD formats that use the same compression algorithms. (Though supposedly Sony says that MPEG2 is better just now because people haven’t learned to get the best out of MPEG4 just yet.) So the picture quality better be good! But I’d still have liked to have seen the demo anyway…

HD Beat - Blu-Ray Demo impressions