What is your experiences with these two "High Defination" (HD & Blu-Ray) faormat as far as "Picture Quality" Clarity and true presentation Of HD Picture.

From a market stand point, BD definitely seems like it's leading the charge. However, from a technical stand point, HD DVD currently takes the lead. How can I possibly say that? On paper, Blu-ray certainly beats HD DVD on technical merits alone, but, if you dig a little deeper you'll find the real story here. Blu-ray offers more storage space which allows for uncompressed audio and slightly higher bitrate on the video. This is definitely a win for Blu-ray. However, because the Blu-ray standard isn't complete, a lot of players will be unable to take advantage of profile 1.1 and profile 2.0 support. These new features would bring Blu-ray on par with HD DVD in terms of extra features. Things like picture in picture and web enabled content, for example. Check out the differences between 300 on HD DVD and Blu-ray if you want to see a prime example. Or the Harry Potter movies. HD DVD has had a finished standard from the start, so, all players will have access to ALL the special features on all the discs. That's simply not the case with Blu-ray. In the end, however, I don't believe either can "win". I think we're stuck with two formats and I believe mainstream adoption will only occur when dual format players drop below 300 USD.

As for your question of PQ and all that, they're pretty equal. On movies that are released on both formats, the PQ is identical and the audio is comparable. I don't have personal experience with the high def audio formats just yet as my receiver doesn't support them, but, from all that I've read things are pretty even there more or less. Each side has its "reference titles". Cars on Blu-ray is beyond fantastic and really shows the WOW factor of HD. Transformers on HD DVD does the same. My advice...either wait another year to see if Blu-ray can really kill off HD DVD(I doubt it), or resign yourself to the fact that you'll be using both formats. Contrary to what some have said, I don't see Blu-ray going away any time soon. I know that a lot of people would love to see it die, but, I don't think that's realistic at this point.

Just remember, this is all simply my opinion and should be taken as such.

Good Argument only time will tell which of these format survive nag which one die out. There are not yet any deep technical analysis or review and comparison of those two formats done by experts.

Actually, you may want to check out highdefdigest.com as there's quite a bit of information available there. Their reviews of both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles are usually spot on and the columns done by some of their reviewers on the technical aspects of both formats are quite good. I just jumped into the HD game this year starting with HD DVD in February and then Blu-ray in July. Currently I have more Blu-ray discs than I do HD DVD's because of all the INSANE deals I've gotten. 5 free discs for buying a player. Buy one get one free deals every other week from Amazon. Half off sales from other sites. It's great. HD DVD has had some good deals but not as many IMO as Blu-ray. These are the things that count with customers. Yea, you can have a 99 USD player but if you don't have a lot of good titles available at reasonable prices then people aren't going to buy. One of the current problems I see and a LOT of HD DVD owners agree, is that the studios are trying these combo discs far too much. They have DVD on one side and HD DVD on the other. Great idea in theory. The problem is the quality of the discs suck and the prices are RIDICULOUS. They often charge 10+ USD more for the combo discs. Meanwhile the Blu-ray of the same movie is 10 USD cheaper. Gee, which one do you go for? Over the next 10 years that the formats are likely to be around, customers will pay more for the discs than they do for the initial player. So while HD DVD players are a great bargain up front at 99 USD or whatever, if consumers are spending 10 USD more per disc in the end the price advantage disappears. I don't think that analysis is taken into consideration very often when I hear all these people talk about the price wars and how Blu-ray is SO much more expensive. Sure, the players are about 100 USD more than HD DVD players, but, they're also 1080p in most cases whereas the lower end HD DVD players are not. I really am not trying to make the case for Blu-ray to win this as I dislike the horrifying anti-consumer nonsense they use such as region coding and now BD+ protection which causes a lot of stand alone players to take MINUTES to get to the menus, but, honestly, HD DVD needs to really step up the game and not rely in player prices to win the war.

In the end, I maintain my position that neither side can truly win. We're stuck with both and if you're just jumping in, I'd recommend a dual format player once the prices drop. If you must have an HD solution now, my gut says to pick Blu-ray over HD DVD in the short term unless you absolutely have to have exclusive movies from the HD DVD camp.

I know some here are fortunate enough to have both formats I only have ($155 +7 movies total) Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player. That said most people don't have the money with the prices where they are so yeah to early to tell.......

I just try to keep up with technology as best i can but i cannot afford both formats Pc Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives are way out of reach for me at this time *sigh*

I hear ya on that. I got the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on drive for my birthday last year bringing me into the HD game. Of course, at the time I didn't have an HDTV yet. The idea was to get the drive and start building a library so that when I did get the tv I'd be good to go. The plan was flawless. I got the Sony LCoS XSRD 50" HDTV in May and was absolutely stunned at the PQ of HD DVD. When the PS3 dropped to 499 in July I had to bite and get one. (I was a *HUGE* PS2 fan but felt Sony screwed the pooch on the PS3 with insanely high prices and lack of good games.) I bought it strictly for Blu-ray playback at the time but have since in the past few days just bought my first games for it. LOL. Anyway, I got my 5 free discs from that a few weeks ago and have been buying like crazy when Amazon has their BOGO deals. I just got 3 movies for my dad for Xmas (he just built an entire home theater set up from the ground up with a Sony Bravia 46" LCD and Sony Blu-ray player) and got 3 for me for free in the process. Since I figured both were going to stick around, I opted to spend the money on the players earlier so I could build a library of movies. A few weeks ago I built a new HTPC that's HD capable. I can rip movies on the PS3 to an external hard drive and play those and I can play HD DVD's directly from the 360 drive. For my birthday this year....I want the LG dual format HD DVD/Blu-ray drive. Then my HTPC will be complete...for now. My advice is to go that route. Start building a new HTPC one component at a time until you can afford the dual format drive and then you'll be good to go.

Easy for you to say SamuriHL but yeah part of your plan is part of my plan. My wife will buy one big thing now and then and then i add to the HT so i will eventually have both formats

This is very expensive for most people is what i was getting at I'm lucky to have what i have so far.

Oh I know it is. Being on the bleeding edge always is. Remember the days of paying 400 USD for a 2x CD burner? How about the early days of DVD playback where you had to get a real magic decoder card because video cards were simply not powerful enough to decode the high bitrate mpeg2 stream? The technology is advancing VERY quickly for HD. We have video cards that are powerful enough not to just decode HD but to apply filtering on it. That's sweet! And because HD DVD and Blu-ray are fighting it out, prices on players have fallen remarkably fast. By this time next year I predict a dual format stand alone player for under 300 USD or even less. When that happens, mainstream people will start looking into HD. Once you get cheap dual format players, this format war will be OVER as far as consumers are concerned. It will no longer matter. So yes, right now it's VERY expensive, but, we're at the infancy stage where adoption is practically nil compared to DVD. Prices will continue to drop and people will start adopting it more and more which will fuel more price drops. Count on it.

yeah i went with HD-DVD first just because i got my player cheap. But if the people behind HD-DVD don't get with it and produce some burners then Blu-ray is all alone at the top. No way to back up discs will hurt them bad.

There is that issue. I decided to say screw burning HD media and to invest in larger hard drives to store ISO images. That way I can load up my HTPC with all my movies that I own and mount the movie I wanna play. Once Slysoft or whoever gets an HD remastering program like CloneDVD, we can make a slimmed down ISO image that will take up less space. Ratatouille, for instance, has 25 minutes of freaking previews that could certainly go. So, burning isn't OVERLY important until prices come WAY down for burners and media. I don't see that happening any time soon.

There's no difference, technically speaking the picture quality is equal. What does vary a lot is the quality of the transfers that are being sold as "HD" by both camps, and the audio quality. Some studios are better at this than others, and some don't give a crap about quality. Over time, technology improves and so do the transfers, but again neither format has an edge. GIGO. The best quality is coming from European and Japanese distributers, and here there's a difference. BD is region coded, HD is not. Any HD player will play any disc from any region. I've got several import HD-DVD's that put the USA releases to shame, and some films are being released overseas that are not being released in the USA.

Prices will decide the winner of this war. But it's just as likely that both formats will die as it is that either one will. In another year, we should see dual format players that are aggressively priced, and it won't matter.

HD DVD is by far the more consumer friendly format. Non-mandatory AACS, no region coding, no BD+ crap to contend with, and a standard that is finished. Excellent in my book. And I agree with you on the transfers. Some are GREAT (Pirates of the Carribean movies, Transformers, Casino Royale, Harry Potter) and some REALLY suck (original Fifth Element is notoriously bad but Stargate could have been better and not done in MPEG2). The fact that some movies are sold on HD DVD outside the US that aren't sold there is impressive. BUT, the flip side is that HD DVD will have to wait on some releases until the movie finishes its over seas run in the theater. That's problematic if you ask me...

Sony is a large company with deep pockets, and with the PS3 using a BD drive, there is no end in sight. The best we can hope for is that in another year or so we see some kind of new logo called "Universal HD" (pure speculation) as the two sides call a truce to indicate players that play back both formats.
That's as much of an "end" to the HD war as I see. The alternative is the equivalent of the DVD+R versus DVD-R "war" which didn't end, it just fizzled out. Who won that war? Now we all have drives that burn both, and just buy the superior/cheaper media without worrying about playback (much).

For burning enthusiasts, I actually think BD has the edge right now - BD-R/RE media is actually available in single and dual layer in quantity, drives are made by multiple companies but prices are still high. Funny thing is you can mostly clip down a "full" (dual layer) HD-DVD movie to fit on a single sided BD-R/RE so maybe for us it will be a mix! Of course such a disc would only play back on a PC, unless you re-muxed/re-authored it to be in BD format, which is doable. Imagine a simple tool like DVDShrink, expect without the re-encoding part that did HDDVD2BD - it would be very cool.

As far as movies themselves go - interesting that someone brought up Harry Potter - the latest movie actually has very marginally more HD content in the identically priced BD version. As studios grow more confident in using all the space on the disc, the extra space will equate to more content on BD. This is not really the case with cross format titles now.
As for the incomplete format thing - the vast majority of BD players are PS3s - there will be about 6 million+ PS3s sold by the end of the year, and PS3s are full spec. With the mandatory release of full spec BD players as of October of this year, in the end the "incomplete spec" players for full BD-J, etc, will end up being a small minority of players (they already are.)

Doesn't mean that people who bought such players won't feel very, very screwed!

I like the HD-DVD format for all the reasons specified previously, just as I liked DVD-R initially for many reasons. I mostly buy MCC04 discs now, and I expect I will be buying BD-R/RE discs in the future. Wouldn't mind being wrong though

Are you sure about that? I've read that the web enabled features on the HD DVD version far surpasses what the BD version offers. There's some actually pretty interesting special features with the web enabled content as far as I read. I'm HOPEFULLY getting the HD DVD gift set for Xmas so I'll be able to play around with it in a week or so.

As for the other things you've said in your post, I have to agree. Once the dual format players that are coming out now drop in price, this "war" will become a non-issue for consumers. They're not buying now for the reason Rolling stated earlier...price is too high. Not everyone has an HDTV let alone a Blu-ray player and/or HD DVD player. Then the discs themselves are often mroe expensive than the DVD version. Once these things balance out a bit and prices drop, mainstream consumers will get into the game. And at that point either one format will simply dominate the other (unlikely IMO), or dual format players will be all the rage. We're at least a year or more away from any of this happening. It's just as possible that consumers snub both formats and they will remain niche products. Laserdisc did ok as a niche product, so, I'm ok with that if it happens. It won't stop me from enjoying the HD content I already own and whatever's released in the future. Bring on Star Trek and Star Wars in HD!

I would have to agree with ya, A recurring theme that I have notice is that it all depends on what codec is being used (MPEG2,MPEG4 or VC-1) and the variable bit rate at which it was done.

A good place to look for screen shot comparisons between HD-DVD and Blu-ray would be found here.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=827529

Spend sometime looking through this thread, there are a lot of comparisons. Xylon the thread starter has put a lot of work into it.

I know about this forum, the majority opinion comes from new members which tend to be either newbies in the subject or less experienced with this highly new technology. We must relay or wait for more review and evaluation of both sides of clans from highly specialized experts on this subject. This is only my own opinion.

HD-DVD and BR_DVD will both live on thru comb drives and burners like DVD- and +R do. It's really simple, no war!

when stand alone combo drives get cheaper, i will get once as well.

The race (war) helps the price goes down faster!

We've seen standalone players dropped their prices from $1000 to $600 to $300.
And standalone combo formats from $1200 to $699.
PC burners from $1200 to $799 to $399.
Media from $29.99 to $9.99.

Next year I hope we will see more and more low prices!

You and me both, zevia. That'd be sweet. I'd love to get a dual format burner. YEA RIGHT!!

Yea SamuriHL, my HD DVD blanks can't wait to be burned.

I don't have any blank media. At this point I'm waiting for things to get cheaper. I'm content with ripping things to my hard drive...for now. Some day I'll want to do backups like I do with DVD, but, it's currently cheaper to build a NAS than it is to back up to media.