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What do I want from Christmas?

I want PS3 to fail miserably... and blu-ray along with it.

:P

/scrooge mode off

Tell us how you REALLY feel!

(not that I totally disagree with you)

Even newer movies are still having "transfer" issues for Blu-Ray. Month after month, the side by side reviews still give the vote to HD-DVD for better video. I am sure that it will all get better as we get further into this whole "format war". I mean, if Blu-Ray was using standard DVD encoding, it is already making leaps forward, but it is still playing catch up to HD-DVD.

A couple of usually reliable people told me that the initial crop of Blu-Ray disks is only using half of the available disk capacity so they require more compression than the corresponding HD-DVD offerings. Blu-Ray has more potential capacity than HD-DVD, but not if you only use half of it ;(

Nobody was sure why Blu-Ray disks were coming out at half capacity (and obviously I'm not 100% sure it is even true) but nomination for the "criminal stupidity in a product launch" award was mentioned a couple of times

Well, they were using single-layer (25GB, versus HD DVD's dual-layer 30GB) discs, I think due to yields on dual-layer discs being low. So there was only 5 GB of difference, but being that they also used MPEG2, it was harder to pull off. Apparently newer dual-layer releases that still use MPEG2 look closer to HD DVD's quality. Also, it will be interesting to see how reviews change now that Sony has their player on the market. Supposedly the Samsung that was the first to market was slapping the image quality around in a couple of ways.

Overall, I think both launches were pathetic, but HD DVD's was less pathetic by a mile. I think it's crappy that the second generation Toshiba player with HDMI 1.3 is at the same price as Blu-ray players, though. There went their main advantage.

C.V.

The good news is that there will be "combo" (play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) players soon. At least they will be available as internal drives on PCs. Many thought it wouldn't be until Q3 of next year, but I am very confident that you will see them shortly in Q1. That should lead to much lower prices by next holiday season.

Rich

And boy, if combo drives work as well as universal DVD-A/SACD drives... there will still be market confusion.

The HD's may be slow, but it's well worth the wait. The image on these disks are gorgeous. I don't pay much attention to the 'reviews', because I've liked every disk I've got so far and some had pretty bad reviews. The are all vastly superior to SD dvd. Hell I even bought and watched Casablanca the other night for the first time. I couldn't sit through it before in a crappy old VHS format, but in HD it was quite enjoyable. Damn good movie too! Now I know where all those 'one liners' come from....."Here's looking at you kid" and others....

I'm probably going to pick up a blue ray player too. it's a little frustrating when half the movies are being put on HD and the other half on BR.