[xsrdx]

There is a huge battle of the formats, but nobody seems to care.

Not much incentive to care unless you're an early adopter. Like HDTV, BluRay/HD DVD offers incremental improvement. Impressive, certainly, but hardly of the magnitude of color, or stereo.

And who wants to replace the hundreds of DVDs already purchased for a slight improvement in picture quality. How many Americans have audio set ups that can truly take advantage of Blu Ray's potential.

People are buying HDTVs because they're flat and big, not because they have a great picture, although that's a nice side benefit. Most are hooked up to plain old cable.

I can live without it until one or the other assumes a controlling position.

[Always Right]

Not much incentive to care unless you're an early adopter. Like HDTV, BluRay/HD DVD offers incremental improvement. Impressive, certainly, but hardly of the magnitude of color, or stereo.

I disagree. HDTV is a quantum leap over the old standard television signals. Any average Joe can see the obvious difference between watching a football game in HDTV vs. regular TV. But I agree, that most people scratch their heads at the quality difference between DVD and HD-DVD. It is very incremmental to the average consumer. I think DVD is good enough for most folks, and this pissing contest between formats of HD-DVD/BlueRay in the end will be meaningless. We will probably have players that play all three, and it will be transparent to the consumer. There will be no rush to upgrade their libraries like there was going from VHS to DVD's.

[SunkenCiv]

Somewhere I read that most consumers appear to be buying uprated DVD players — players (and they’re cheap) which improve the picture output for standard DVDs, making them look much better on HDTVs. I could go for that...

[tje]

I respectively disagree. I’ve had HD for years, but it’s only right now that content is available in volume. I guess that well over half of all I watch now is in HD. It is a vast improvement over standard definition.

I was one of the lucky ones who got one of the $99 HD-DVDs from Walmart. It was serendipity as I was in the market for new DVD anyway.

You are correct in that most people do not have their HDTVs hooked up to a real HD source. But once you have it, you can’t go back to standard def.

[paudio]

I agree. The incremental improvement between the 2 systems is very different from the case with the video war in the 1970s between Betamax vs. VHS. Then, having a VCR (which meant you could record and replay a program or watch a movie whenever you want) was a jump from only having a TV.