depends on who you ask. if it's someone that owns a ps3, i'm sure you can count on their unbiased opinion that it will certainly be blu ray.
Blue Ray cases are the colors of the Jazz and Mavericks. HD-DVD cases are the colors of the Rockets. You should definitely buy and HD-DVD player I have no clue who is winning. I bought the $100 HD-DVD player Wal-Mart had a couple of weeks ago, so I hope it wins, but I certainly don't know.
wow, that is actually the best logic to buying ANYTHING. If something is blue/gray/green.. do NOT buy it. If something is Red/White.. buy it. Simple yet genius. +3 for wes.
Maybe there's some Chinese company that has unscrupulously combined both. They backwards-engineer every other product, like the iphone. Have any of our Chinese members seen something like this?
Supposedly Blu-ray is winning but Sony acknowledges the situation is a "stalemate". I don't see how you can go wrong paying $99 for an HD-DVD player.
Actually I think South-Koreans will come with that first, then the Chinese will make a copy of that....
It seems like the two are going to co-exist for the foreseeable future. Just because one studio supports one side is not enough any more. If all the studios decide to go with one or the other, then we have a winner. However, that doesn't appear to be likely at all. As for the consumer, their perfectly fine to buy/rent what is available in their hi-def format of choice and then resort back to regular DVD when the film they want to see is not in their hi-def format. So, it's not like the consumer is forcing the war to be won. Sales are not lopsided enough to hand us a winner...especially since HD DVD players are cheaper. PS3 will ensure Blu Ray stays in the game which, without PS3, Blu Ray would be having a much tougher time of it due to their higher priced players and more expensive production costs when compared to HD DVD. I'm not so sure there has to be a winner in this war. The consumer doesn't really demand a winner. One side may be more profitable (higher sales)...but that doesn't preclude the other side from being profitable, either. As long as you have major players (MS, Sony) and studios on either side of the line, then who can win?
As of this moment, Blu-ray titles are outselling HD-DVD 2-to-1. There are also many more Blu-ray players in homes thanks to the PS3. However, HD-DVD is doing better than Blu-ray in terms of standalone player sales(how could they not be with a $99 price tag?). I know this isn't the answer you wanna hear, but if you're a big movie fan, you'll likely have to get players for both formats. If you absolutely positively refuse to be format neutral, I guess you should go with Blu-ray. It has more studio support. HD-DVD only has Paramount and Universal(and the Weinstein Co. if you count them) as exclusives. And quite frankly, their recent movies are mostly crap and they refuse to release any decent catalog titles.
It looked like Blu-Ray was going to be the clear cut winner, but the projections over the holidays have the HD DVD making inroads with the big price cuts of their stand alone players. The Playstation 3 with its less expensive "entry" model is going to really help Blu-Ray. It doesn't hurt that the Playstation 3 is widely considered the best Blu-Ray player on the market....even better than the high dollar ones. I think its going to come down to us having 2 formats for 2-3 years with Blu-Ray winning out in the end. You COULD get a Playstation 3 for the gaming/Blu-Ray, then grab one of the $99 HD DVD players to go format nuetral, but that gets expensive. There are some reports of Wal-Mart having a special that if you by the $499 80 gb PS3 this Saturday, you'll get 10 instant purchase Blu-Ray titles free PLUS the 5 mail in titles, so that's 15 blue ray movies (approx. $350 worth of movies PLUS a game title AND the higher end PS3 which is better and yet still less expensive than MOST other BluRay players on the market). There is also a TEN movie give away on a lot of the Toshiba lines...and they just dropped the Toshiba A3 to $199 on amazon with 10 movies free. (Three instant, 2 in the box, 5 mail away). Of course if you have a vast DVD library, you could always go to the Toshiba 2AX...while more expensive, it is widely considered the BEST standard DVD upconversion player on the market AND its a great HD DVD player as well. Its going to run closer to $400 right now though. You could also wait for Samsung's new dual player that is supposed to be in the 500-800 price range that comes out in a couple months I think. The current LG dual player is actually a BluRay player that can play HD DVD movies as well, but ONLY the movies, it doesn't do any of the menus or extras on HD DVD. The next gen LG is supposed to fix that, but I'm not sure if its out yet.
I'm going to buy some HD-DVD movies for the first time. Getting a laptop on friday that has an HD-DVD drive.
Blu-Ray had the clear lead but than a couple studios went exclusive to HD-DVd. The next big development will happen which Warner Bros. picks a side which they said they will. Initially, they were going to wait and see what format the consumer wants but it was become clear consumers want the decision made for them. They were looking into technology that would allow both formats to use just one disk but have since put it on hold bc no other studio is putting out movies for both formats. What's interesting is that these disks would not be like the widescreen/fullscreen DVDs where you have to flip the disc over for one or the other. Both the blu-ray and hd-dvd data would be on one side of the disc. Thought that was neat. Wait and see if WB changes anything. Unless blu-ray players can get cheap fast, I'd have a hard time seeing how hd-dvd can be put down when it's players are less than $200.
