Marvel of Blu-ray comes to town

Emma Roberts stood before a glistening, state-of-the-art TV screen at South Coast Plaza Friday and invited passersby to behold the next phase in home viewing.

“Hold onto your seats,” Roberts, a presenter for Blu-ray Disc, told the crowd of around two dozen that sat on bright orange benches in front of the screen. “This is my favorite part. You’re about to witness a revolution in the future of entertainment.”

Whether it is a revolution remains to be seen.

Blu-ray, which offers pictures six times sharper than standard DVDs and theater-quality sound, has been locked in a tight battle with competitor HD DVD to bring high-definition entertainment to the masses. By the time Disney’s Magical Blu-ray Tour stopped at South Coast Plaza Friday, the two companies had put media moguls around the world on two warring sides.

To those who hadn’t been following the battle, however, the tour stop at South Coast Plaza was simply an opportunity to see movies and video games clearer than ever. Interactive stations featuring Blu-ray movies and video games dotted the area outside Macy’s while shoppers stopped by to marvel at the new technology.

Jackie Foster, a teacher’s aide from Huntington Beach, watched clips from “Pirates of the Caribbean” and other Disney releases while her two children lined up at the video game stations.

“What I really like about high-definition in a movie is that you really feel like you’re there,” she said. “You feel like you’re there in the middle of it.”

The display is scheduled to be at South Coast Plaza from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. today and 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

The Disney tour, sponsored by Panasonic, began last week in Canoga Park and plans to move across the country through December.

Disney is one of the companies offering products on Blu-ray, while Paramount, DreamWorks and Universal have sided with HD DVD. Sandy Segerstrom Daniels, the co-owner of South Coast Plaza, managed a tour stop because her nonprofit, the Festival of Children Foundation, works with Disney.

“They’ve been one of our best corporate sponsors the last six years, so we’re thrilled to be working with them again,” she said.

Eric Maehara, the vice president of communications for Disney, stood by Friday to watch the crowds. The main purpose of the tour, he said, was not to compete with HD DVD but to enlighten consumers about what Blu-ray offered.

“We did research last year that showed over 25 million households had high-definition TVs and over half of them weren’t watching high-definition [discs],” Maehara said. “That’s a huge, huge audience.”