In an earlier thread I already asked if there are people here that have an idea who will win the blue laser war. However I also know people who have no clue why these formats are really needed. Did you already see content on each of the formats and are you convinced that we really need any of them?

I for one certainly don't (and I couldn't care less about which format wins). I hardly watch any TV and a home theater thing isn't going to make me a better, healthier or happier person either. I may look at it again in five years or so, if it hasn't been made obsolete by other forms of storage and when it costs the equivalent of today's DVD's. Then again, my GSM is nine years old and I don't have a GPS either.

The video quality on some of the original DVDs really sucks, so i guess we need a format with hi-res A/V. But we certainly dont need the stupid copy protections they're trying to push down our throats

hopefully we will do away with them. for those not sure, have u ever seen a 720 plasma and full 1920*1080 side by side? even without hidef source the diff is obvious. so once i get meself one of those, why not to fork out for a blue player?

well of course i may as well wait a few years for 3D glasses

Everyone's opinion will be different of course but I voted yes, to get better quality entertainment and more data space.

Price is my overriding concern. When I walk into a best buy and see one Blu-ray disk for $22, that's plain stupid to buy--when I can go to Office Max or someplace and get 100 Verbatims for good data storage for the same price--and a LOT more storage (438 gb vs. the Blu-ray). Also, compared to VHS, regular DVD is a vast improvement. I've not bought into this 'get an HD TV and HD/Blu-ray player' foolishness for good reason: price is prohibitive and I don't need such an expensive toy, when for my money I can get just as good of a SDTV set with a larger picture screen and enjoy it more than having to spend so much more on a set and player I won't enjoy any more. I vote for both to lose.

True, but the prices will drop so once every new technology will be affordable. I bought my first DVD device only one year ago....

You're right, it doesn't make sense to buy MSRP $22 if you can get it online for about $10 like in here. Of course it is still a lot more compare to the bulk DVD in 25/50 pack but once BD-R or even HD DVD-R comes in 25/50/100 pack it should go down price wise.

If we compare single pack DVD vs BD-R
TDK DVD+R 4.7GB single pack $2 vs TDK BD-R 25GB single pack $14, or about 7x more expensive but the capacity is also about 5-6x more.

As cheap as hard drives are now IDE/SATA i don't see any point in buying blue laser formats. It seems in this thread that some of you have free drives which takes some of the pain out of buying the media for them.

Well, even with a big lowering of price on both the players, burners and media (where all three would get down to current burner, player and media prices for standard CD/DVD media), I won't be buying it, in part because again, while there may be more capacity and the format may provide better viewing quality for some, I still haven't seen anything that 'jumps out at me' nor makes me dying to buy any of the 3 new offerings.

I won't even think about blue laser until a few years when I can afford an SED TV. That is the first big screen TV that has a picture as good or better than a tube TV. Thus, it will be my first big screen TV. For now, I like having three 28" tubes to watch simultaneously when good ball games are on. PIP does the job with HTPC.

You may be waiting a very long time for SED...

It's commercial development has been stalled many times now & signs are not good for it's future

I really do hope that you are comparing Plasma TVs that are 60 inch or larger. Everything that I have read states that unless you have a television with a screen size of 60 inches or larger, and/or you are viewing your television from about 1-2 feet away, then nobody can tell the difference between the two (i.e. 42" Plasma 720p vs 1080p). The differences that many people insist on noticing are mearly placebo effect. I don't know the exact technical aspects of it all, but it has everything to do with the way human eyes interpret what they see. That being said, I doubt that if you set up a 720p vs 1080p image experiment (double-blide study) and asked 100 people to vote between screen A or B as which has the best picture, your results would come pretty close to 50-50.

I recently had a heated discussion with one of those know-it-all Best Buy employees. He was trying to talk me into buying an $800 BD player because the picture quality and everything else, in his opinion, was superior. My stance on the issue is that since most BD and HD movies are now using the same codec, there is no difference in the picture quality. Ironically, I was there to buy the XBox 360 Add-On for my PC. Not because I think that's the format to go with, but because it was the least expensive at that moment. Any how, this discussion went on for quite some time and this idiot kept insisting that BD is better because it came in 1080p. That quickly changed after I showed him that the HD DVD players that he is selling also broadcast a 1080p signal. In any case, to make this long story short, I told him to set up the following experiment:

Choose 2 HD Televisions that are 1080p capable (they have to be the same). Pick their best BD player and HD DVD player and load Discovery Channel's Planet Earth Series with the same exact scene on. Then cover up the players. Finally, ask the first 100 people that come into the door to pick which image was better. I told him that the results would be near 50-50 as there theoritically isn't a difference technologically speaking. Not only that, most people either wouldn't care, or wouldn't be able to perceive any differences.

Well I went back 2 days later. Of course he had done a half-assed job of the experiment. He didn't cover up the players. Furthermore, he told each person what player he was using. But worse, he only used 1 television, and had to switch inputs between the 2 devices. Additionally, he did the study on only 25 people (which were all store employees). Here were his "results":

11 stated BD was clearly better.
6 people did not notice any difference
8 stated HD DVD was clearly better

Based on this, that guy proclaimed that BD was clearly superior to HD DVD. When I told him he needed to review his results, he insulted me by telling me that I needed to learn "better social skills." It was at this point that I was so flabergasted, that I told him that it was morons like him that prevented me from buying big ticket items from Best Buy and that my money on big ticket items will go to Circuit City as they don't have a tendency to insult their customers.

In any case, for a long while now, I've wondered why there is so much bashing and flaming between the supporters of both camps. Both technologies are doomed to fail. Not because of the technology. Quite frankly, the high-def formats both have unbelievable picture quality. They are due to fail because they are so prohibitively expensive, and they are completely bogged down with DRM schemes. People will tire of spending their hard-earned money on these expensive devices when the movie they bought last week no longer plays because the DRM changed this week.

Anyway, sorry for the long-winded reply. Just needed to "vent" a little.

Thanks for your "ear".

Its not that easy, you can really only compare BD and HDDVD if their content has used the same codecs (H.264 preferably).

As clearly stated above, only needed for DVDs when you own a large screen. At about 36" and below it is wasted.

If the same movie is available on both BD/ HD DVD, then the studio usually just use same encode for video part so there is no visual difference.

Sadly that wasnt the case in th last months.

Now that SED TV is stalled in a lawsuit against Canon, I will not be getting a Big Screen TV until they make one that has an acceptable picture. HD certainly has not proven to be nearly enough of an improvement to justify any huge increase in price over CRT, which is still the best picture. The new Toshiba generation of TV is over two thousand dollars for an 11" screen. I pass.

What truly disappoints me is that we have such better technology than blue laser that was due out in 2006, but thanks to the major backing of the inferior blue laser technology it was pushed aside (IMO anyway). Perhaps it was just do to cost, but I don't think so.

I am, of course, talking about holographic discs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_memory

Then again, there have been reports of this since 2004, so who knows. Maybe they'll be really cheap in 2010 or so. I still think that the major backers of the current blue laser didn't want a competing product and that movie companies didn't want people to have the ability to store over 100 full length dvd movies on one disc.

just wanted to say WOW!!