I'm betting my money on HD by the way.

I am betting that Sony won't let BR die off until they setup the next gen PS4 which might be sooner than later considering sales are so poor for the PS3. I did se a BR player the other day for $399, BR prices are dropping too.

My son's friends say that the PS3 is worse than the PS2. Is that true?

In what way? It certainly isn't going to dominate in sales this generation, like the PS2 did in the last one, if that's what they're talking about.

They say that the machine isn't reliable. They've reverted to the PS2.

I haven't personally had any problems with reliability. If anything, the PS2 had more hardware issues. Reading all of the gaming blogs, nothing ever seems to come up about PS3 failure rates, whereas the PS2 had its share. It was the console with the most problems until the Xbox 360, which took the crown and then some.

Maybe they're having issues with the backwards-compatibility? I haven't even tried any PS2 games on my system, as I never owned a PS2. Still, I thought the compatibility was in the high 90s, percentage-wise, as it actually had PS2 hardware built-in until the new 40 gig models came out.

Anyway, my PS3 has been rock-solid so far, so who knows.

Strange. I put in Transformers in just a few minutes ago, and the picture at the "top" of your two samples, where they are in the Osprey choppers, looks terrible in your screen shots vs. what I see on mine at 104" of 720p. The second picture you show of the "video conference" scene is a lot closer to what I see all of the time, but still seems a hair less detailed that what I see. Could be just part of taking a photo to share.

Hopefully that firmware disc I made you gets there soon so that you can try that out.

Hey Mark, thanks for the tip. I followed your links and it worked perfectly. I'm not computer literate, but somehow I made it work.

I did my upgrade over the weekend via broadband. No hiccups & all works well. Of course, I didn't have anything unusual even before the patch. Mine worked fine with the 7 HD-DVDs I played and a few regular DVDs. Played music CDs as well.

Patch was a non event for me but I thought I might try some of the online features on the HD-DVDs and I need the patch for that.

I guess for once in my life, Murphy's Laws didn't apply double to me since my last name is the same.

I will agree that the difference in quality among some HD-DVDs is very apparent. Some are crystal and others well, it's just not up to spec. Of course, most were older movies and there is only so much they can do.