Posted on 03/19/2006 7:22:18 PM PST by CAWats
The battle between two formats seeking to become the high-definition successor to the DVD officially gets under way when Toshiba's first HD DVD player hits the market April 18, at the same time as the first HD DVD movies arrive in stores.
Sony's (SNE) rival Blu-ray Disc is expected to follow two months later. Then it will be up to consumers to pick a winner. The face-off of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc promises to be the biggest format war since VHS beat Betamax in the videocassette market in the 1980s.
Analysts say consumers' choice likely will come down to content. Hollywood movie studios are split on the two formats, but more side with Blu-ray.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
That sucks. I'm not touching one until the dust settles.
Sony is so proprietary in their outlook I'm kinda hoping they'll lose even though bluray might be slightly better technology.
It's not just Betamax . . . it's minidisc and atrac and msx (going back to 1983) and more.
Analysts are more often wrong than not.
The consumer's choice, based on the beta-VHS war, will come down to price.
This will be fantastic for industries that use large data sets. Writable data HD-DVD's will allow cheap archiving and data exchange instead of obscure, expensive, and rapidly obsolete tape formats.
So Microsoft is er..anti-family?! Please..put down the crackpipe..
Please refer to my #6. This is the first I've heard on this angle. Maybe the Catholic ping list can be informed.
I have to disagree on that for three reasons:
1. Blu-Ray will likely be more successful because far more Hollywood studios back the Blu-Ray format than HD-DVD.
2. Blu-Ray disc's higher-storage capacity means much less compression is needed for full-resolution 1920x1080 progressive-scan video.
3. Blu-Ray will offer HDMI 2.0 support, necessary for the new generation of non-CRT rear-projection TV's that will fully accept 1080-line progressive video through the HDMI connection. Toshiba has yet to say when will HD-DVD players offer HDMI 2.0 connections, which means at best the signal transfer from player to your TV will either be in 1080-line interlaced or 720-line progressive scan video, both inferior to 1080-line progressive scan direct connections.
Typical Catholic bashing.
Will be happy to hit abuse on you.
"The consumer's choice, based on the beta-VHS war, will come down to price."
And availability of movies or whatever. At least here in Denver people went with VHS because of this even though Beta-max was a better format.
Live and learn.
Given that the backers of both formats are insisting on trying to ram ridiculous DRM restrictions down our throats, I'll be happy if they both crash and burn.
"Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively and 50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively."
At that price, it is cheaper and maybe more reliable to buy hard drives than the equivalent number of Blu-Ray disks.
It's correct, but PS 3 will be able to play old games, including the DVD PS 2 discs. There will be players that will be able to play both, so that would be one method to consider, I guess Blue Ray will succeed, since it will be used for PS 3, and has better chance to be accepted since it also has use for computer data storage with about 50GB, allowing mass production to lower the cost of the components.
ping
It's probably good that you are not drawn into the hype.
In a free world, there is every reason to believe a third and better technology could come along any day and trounce them both.
I remember when blank VHS tapes were almost $20 each. The first blanks will be expensive, but they'll quickly go down in price. It's a lot easier to ship a DVD than a hard drive. They'll fit in a standard FedEx letter package. A hard drive has to be packed and protected more carefully to avoid damage.
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