Harmy said:
Erm, no "more horrendous" and "more terrible" are comparative terms - "horrendous" and "terrible" are simply terms of horrendity and terribleness - something can be horrendous and terrible and that in no way implies that nothing could be more horrendous and terrible.
I've already explained why "horrendous" and "terrible" are inherently comparative terms. The very concept of such words demands that something better exists or can be imagined, and therein lies the comparison. And, as I've already said, "horrendous" and "terrible" are both "bottom of the barrel" terms, which also demands things above it in the barrel, either real or imagined.
But ok, you want a scale: VCD - 1, GOUT - 2.5, Good DVD - 6, Good BD - 10.
I find your scale odd, because on the line between VCD and BD, the GOUT and good DVD are relatively close together, which I illustrated with the 30 foot screen example. The 30-foot screen example pushes the best home video format we have toward its limits, which makes it a lot easier to see how inferior formats compare to it. Do you really think there would be a drastic difference in perceived quality between a good DVD and the GOUT when displayed on a 30-foot screen?
And excluding outdated technology from the debate is in no way arbitrary, it's logical.
It is not only arbitrary, but it is counter-intuitive as well. The very concept of judging things "by today's standards" implies that the thing you are judging is not up to today's standards, which usually means it is old, obselete, etc. In nearly all cases where things are judged "by today's standards", the thing being judged is something that hasn't been manufactured for many years. Someone might say, "This 8-track tape doesn't sound very good by today's standards," and that would be perfectly normal. What would be abnormal (and arbitrary) is if someone then said, "You can't judge it by today's standards because it is a dead format".
And yeah, sure on a 30ft screen, what you said may be true to a point, although even then a proper anamorphic DVD would make a huge difference over the GOUT, I've seen both the GOUT and the 2004 DVD projected on a large screen and the difference was still very big, although in both cases it wasn't very good of course.
Well, I explained the point of the 30-foot screen example above. Yes, BD is a home video format, but when making objective assessments of quality, you have to consider its potential (even if that potential is usually not realized in practice). When you push BD to its limits, the differences between various DVDs in the pond become trivial next to the ocean between them and BD.
But we're talking about home video here and yes I would personally never go back to watching even anamorphic DVDs but I remember when my dad first got a 1080p HDTV, I was testing the GOUT on it and my dad saw and he immediately said that it looked like crap and asked if I was sure there wasn't anything wrong with it, so I tried putting in the 2004 DVD and he was like: "See, now this is HD!" And when I put the HDTV 1080p version on (I was playing all of that from my laptop) he was like: "Meh, that's pretty much the same." True story.
On my 22" CRT PC monitor (Mitsubishi Diamondtron, 1920x1440), sitting only a couple feet away as you normally do with a PC monitor, I can see the difference among a bad DVD, a good DVD, and 720p. I generally can't see the difference between 720p and 1080p however. But 1080p has quality that doesn't become perceptible until you get into much larger screen sizes. 1080p/2K is enough resolution for commercial theater-sized screens (AotC and RotS for example).