Red Flag of Surrender, Blu Prevails

Today, the ‘red’ flag of surrender was raised by Toshiba, the maker of the HD-DVD format DVDs and disc players.  They have announced they will not produce any more products with the HD-DVD technology.

It’s final.  Blu is better than Red.

For those who’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 2 years, HD-DVD was one of the two competing next-generation DVD formats who were competing for the High Definition DVD market.  It was an all-out VHS vs. BetaMax rehash.

Sadly, last time evil prevailed and VHS became the standard.  However, this time methinks the powers that be have made the correct choice, and Blu-ray was the right way to go.

The only thing that makes this victory even more sweet is that Microsoft backed the HD-DVD format, and once again has picked a loser.  Now what are all the poor souls who bought Xbox 360’s going to do?

What does this mean for the average bear?  If you’re planning to buy a new dvd player in the next year or so, you will have two options – future proof and pay a little more for a Blu-ray, or get a very cheap standard DVD player.

I say ‘future proof’ because unless you have one of the most recent HDTVs (one that does 1080p), you will not reap the full benefit of the Blu-ray disc.  In some cases, you might as well be watching a standard DVD.  Don’t let silly people who speak of ‘upconverting’ make you think it’s the magic bullet either.  You won’t see much difference in DVD vs Blu-Ray until you have a top of the line HD set.

Do you need to upgrade all your DVD library?  No.  Blu-ray players will play standard DVDs.  But Blu-ray discs cannot be played on standard DVD players.

Personally, I will wait until a high quality player is under $150 before I upgrade.  Right now the low end players are still well over $200.

3 thoughts on “Red Flag of Surrender, Blu Prevails”

  1. Josh and his brother have been HDDvd and BluRay battling for the past year. Josh has been so pumped that he won the war.

  2. My only sadness with Blu-Ray winning (and this despite the fact that I work for the Xbox 360 team) is the fact that it’s a Sony format. If you want to talk evil, I think Sony’s a pretty high contender in that court. (Root kits, proprietary media formats, severe overpricing…some major misfires.) Luckily, I never bought an HD-DVD drive for my Xbox 360, and as it doesn’t come included, it wasn’t a big loss to me. I also hadn’t started buying any High-Def media until the format war was over. When Toshiba conceded defeat on Friday, I went right out and bought myself a PlayStation 3. I have a 42″ High-Def television, and the quality difference is stunning. My first Blu-Ray purchase was the BBC series, Planet Earth. Ho. Ly. Cow.

    I do have a complaint about how much more expensive Blu-Ray discs are. What that will end up meaning to me is that I’ll rent more movies and buy far fewer…only the ones I really love. I don’t think it very likely that my Blu-Ray collection will ever rival my DVD collection of 300+ movies.

    Now if we can just get affordable Blu-Ray burners to come along here pretty soon, I need a high-volume removable storage option for backing up media files!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.