I recently stood in front of one of those marketing kiosks displaying the technology of Blue Ray video, and here are my thoughts.
I was never impressed by Sony's video technology. You see, I live in San Francisco at the moment, and there is a Sony building here called The Metreon. The store inside showcases Sony's latest technology. On display are what seems to be every top-of-the-line television model Sony has to offer. In my opinion, the picture quality of every HD television I see is disappointingly unimpressive. Pixels are highly visible and heavily grainy, especially when the picture includes deep blacks and plenty of motion.
After watching a complete demonstration of Blue-Ray, things changed. I've got to tell you, the video quality is quite impressive, and quite comparable to B&O (I know, I know... how dare I say such things). There was a short clip of some sort of tornado going through a town, and it blew me away (no pun intended).
That said, I would still buy a BeoVision over an HD TV with Blue-Ray any day. The way I see it, B&O don't need to make their televisions "HD". The reason I put 'HD' in parenthesis is because B&O TV's are already HD in my eyes. You don't need anything but the BeoVision to get your "HD" quality. A B&O TV has a way of turning ANY (and I mean ANY!) signal into what the general public regards as HD. In fact, a friend of mine worked at the B&O store, here in San Francisco, and we went through a couple of backed-up DVD-R's in the demo room. Mind you, these DVD's are 4Gig compressed versions of their 8Gig originals. The picture was completely unbelievable in its depth and clarity. So-called 1080dpi, HD, Blue-Ray, and whatever else there is, come no where near as close as to what a BeoVision can achieve, and that's a statement I firmly uphold.