First let me preface this: My reply will sound argumentative, but I am just going for a discussion, I swear!
1) There have been over 7.5M 360's sold which includes both core and premium models, therefore there are potentially 7.5M HD-DVD players for an incremental cost of $200 (or less if you go online), not too shabby. If you go the full cost route, it's a minimum investment of $500 ($299 core + $200 add on) and a maximum investment of $600 ($399 + $200).
2) The 360 is actually available. I don't disagree I haven't seen much in the way of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD stand alone players in stores, but you are virtually guaranteed to get a 360 if you want into any store. If not, there will be somewhere in your neighborhood. PS3's you can't find, period.
3) I have been unable to really locate either HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, so that doesn't bode well for either, but such stuff is expected given the infancy of both technologies.
4) I totally agree that the PS3 is going to sell as a cheap Blu-Ray player for a while, lets face it a $600 gaming console that plays Blu-Ray or a $800 stand alone unit? Let's not deal with the gaming capacity discussion because it isn't pertinent to the Format War (just heading it off so someone doesn't hijack the thread).
5) Customers are much more willing to look on line and buy stuff from e-tailers this time around as opposed to the previous Format wars, so confining people to brick and mortar stores, while a very good point for many customers, is a diminishing limitation on products.
6) I think that if a customer had a choice between a PS3 and buying a 360 + the HD drive, they would be hesitant, just because it doesn't come integrated in the 360. However, Availability is a big issue, is there even going to be another shipment of PS3's before Christmas? I honestly don't have the answer to that, but just something to think about.
In all honesty, I don't think either camp has done a great job of marketing. In fact, I would go as far to say as they have done a very poor job. I was in Best Buy looking for a 1080p television (just because I still have yet to purchase a HD set.... damn college kids and no money ) and not one sales person even mentioned matching it with a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. I think part of the blame can be placed on retailers not educating their people, but most of the blame should be put on the respective camps.
Anyways i made a couple posts and they seem to be gone now and i even had to search for this thread to even get it to come up again since the email links kept telling me the thread i was looking for doesnt exsist anymore
As far as your console comparasine its a great one btw. The sales of those consoles will determin what people will buy movie wise later (for those of whome that buy consoles.)
the ps3 could in fact hurt blue ray considerably since its pretty much not available.
Anyways since my posts are gone ill have to try and remember what i even posted and return.
Anyways i made a couple posts and they seem to be gone now and i even had to search for this thread to even get it to come up again since the email links kept telling me the thread i was looking for doesnt exsist anymore
Anyways since my posts are gone ill have to try and remember what i even posted and return.
yeah I can't figure out what the hell happened, nor do I know what I said. I remember making 2 points about hardware manufacturers tending towards HD-DVD and movie studios tending towards Blu-Ray, but I forgot what my analysis was lol. Strange things have been happening lately ... its the government! Run ET Run!
Here is my entire argument, it is irrational and illogical:
Blu-Ray = Sony
HD-DVD = Not Sony
Ergo, I choose HD-DVD.
I have had enough dealings with sony's BS not working, breaking, being sent in for repairs and coming back broken that I am never supporting another sony product again. It makes little sense, but I am just so frustrated with their lack of innovation with respect to what a customer wants as opposed to what they can do.
Oh well, here is hoping to HD-DVD's win!
Blu-Ray does not equal Sony. Sony is a partner, allong with many other compaines, ie. Warner or Universal (can't remember which one) etc.
Well when they release a product as popular and well known as the PS3 they have pretty much become the face of Blu-Ray and no matter what you say or how true your statement may be that doesn't change the minds of the public and how they view Blu-Ray and Sony
I also made a long post last week on this topic about Blu-Ray players and HD-DVD players, Hybrid players and actually Hybrid discs, unfortunately it got deleted or something but i don't want to go through everything but there are the links to some interesting info for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray
And the hybrid disc that could theoretically contain both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies because of their different pit depths of .1mm and .6mm respectively
As far as your console comparasine its a great one btw. The sales of those consoles will determin what people will buy movie wise later (for those of whome that buy consoles.)
the ps3 could in fact hurt blue ray considerably since its pretty much not available.
Anyways since my posts are gone ill have to try and remember what i even posted and return.
The lack of ps3 wont hurt much imo cause both br and hd-dvd both been out and sales were still moving along, I have both ps3 and 360 w/hd , pretty much most of my movies are hd-dvd but i have to say that the 360 is a POS. I along with many other people are having problems with the console and updates, I will be going on my 3rd one at a repair cost of $85 to $140 per repair (actually send you a refurb) so now i have the hd-dvd player but no console for a month. The price difference between movies is only $5 more for BR. so i dont see that being a turn off, its also true that BR are a little more fragile but i dont think it will put people off. MSft built such a crappy console that i have a problem buying any more hd-dvd and am willing to try BR for a while, Please keep in mind i am not saying ps3 is not going to have its issues, just hopefully they built a little better system
Quote :
Here is my entire argument, it is irrational and illogical:
Blu-Ray = Sony
HD-DVD = Not Sony
Ergo, I choose HD-DVD.
I have had enough dealings with sony's BS not working, breaking, being sent in for repairs and coming back broken that I am never supporting another sony product again. It makes little sense, but I am just so frustrated with their lack of innovation with respect to what a customer wants as opposed to what they can do.
Oh well, here is hoping to HD-DVD's win!
Blu-Ray does not equal Sony. Sony is a partner, allong with many other compaines, ie. Warner or Universal (can't remember which one) etc.
Sony is a major partner alot of r&d along with samsung and apple, there are about 10 more companies that have some sort of role but can figure out what part they played.
Quote :
. If you have a high def video card you can plug in a Xbox 360 DRive to you pc and watch High def content. Being that the drive is $200 its a cheap way to become an early adopter.
well you could but that would not help there is no support for it yet as far as an hd video player, japanease version of win dvd 8 is the only one you have a chance of seeing anything on. and it only goes to 540p.
Here is my entire argument, it is irrational and illogical:
Blu-Ray = Sony
HD-DVD = Not Sony
Ergo, I choose HD-DVD.
EXACTLY my thoughts.
How many more failed Sony standards are they going to try to push on us? Memory Stick? BetaMax? UMD? Come on... enough is enough. Sony owns a record/movie label... we turn to them for CONTENT... not content protection and control.
Every commercial blu-ray disk has a list of unathorized product codes. A product gets to be on the unathorized list if sony or the MPAA find out that that model has beeen hacked by someone.
If you put a disk in your drive that has your drive model on its list, even if your drive isn't hacked, the drive firmware disables itself forever and becomes a $800 paperweight and you have no comeback.
I've also heard HD-DVD has something similar.
Given the above, I'm pretty happy with never buying either and staying with DVD. There should have been a 3rd option in the vote called 'neither'.
I don't want to start a console war here, mainly because it isn't the thread for it, but I haven't had any issues with my 360. I hope your problem is an isolated one. Sony has had their share of initial launch blunders. I also never had any issues with my original Xbox. So from personal experience I have begun to trust M$ consoles.
My only real point about the consoles is that HD-DVD has a leg up with the potential to have 8M HD-DVD players whereas Sony has 300k, so the question becomes who can better adapt to the market? From historical data we all know Sony tries to bend the market to its will..... yeah we all know how that went. M$ (if we are to compare the 2 main players) tends to be more adaptive to the market, though they don't always get it right, they seem much more willing to listen to feedback. The first Xbox was huge, ugly, clunky and awkward. The 360 is much more stylish, thin, and what a normal console looks like. So take it as you will, but if a format wins I think HD-DVD will and hope it will. If anything, Blu-Ray will be relegated to archive duty due to capacity.
I see more movies being advertised on Blue Ray. On the posters at the rental store it says comming out on DVD, PSP, and Blue Ray. So I would think Blue will win at the rental store.
On the other hand Blue Ray is Sony meaning everything is licensed, copyrighted, etc... Drives, blanks, etc... will cost more. Whoever has the cheapest drives and the cheapest media will win. If Verbatim, Maxell, Taiyo Yuden all support HD-DVD then the PC will embrace HD-DVD. The movie industry will then slowly turn towards HD-DVD.
It's stupid to have 2 technologies on the market. Whichever is better should be used. Its another Beta vs VHS and sony again is alone with Blue Ray and they are going to loose even though technically Blue Ray might be better. At least DVD-r and DVD+R are compatible even though most people don't know trhe difference between the 2 and don't know which blanks to buy at the store.
What's the difference between a pack of DVD-R verbatims and DVD+R vebatims. Both are 4.7GB and 16x? Man the industry can be confusing.
It's the same with Plasma vs LCD vs DLP. If Samsung makes 3 40" TVs each using a diffent technology which one should you buy? You would think that they would choose the best one and just make that? It's all marketing and its all bullshit. In the end its whichever blank media is the cheapest and most avilable that will win. So I say HD-DVD will prevail.
Dual Layer DVD-R hasn't caught on yet cause the only blanks you can buy are $5 each if you can find them. SO nobody gives a shit a bout them. Same thing will be the death of Blue Ray. The only BLue Ray burner will be SOny or Plextor at $500+. Sony is digging themselves another grave.
Blue-Ray has a better ring to it's name, but the "dvd" in HD-DVD could be key to it's success.
Ma and Pa say, "We just bought a HD-TV, maybe we need a HD-DVD player too."
If the Blue-Ray succeeds I think it will owe much of it to the PS3. We saw what the DVD player functions in the PS2 did for that tough decision to buy a new game machine.
The battle is much closer this time around. I have no idea.
With HD-DVD being readily available for the Xbox 360 and its 7+million(Granted probably not half of them own HDTVs) owners i can see those people that adopt that solution will in the future lean toward what they know. And with a collection of HD-DVD movies will go with a HD-DVD player when in the future the Xbox 360 is obsolete and/or they need a HD-DVD for their other TV. This does exclude the PS3 but it has a long way before it reaches the market saturation the Xbox 360 has.
Also with HD-DVD players being so much cheaper than BR players we all know the enthusiast consumer/rich consumer, or high end market does not hold up the market, its the midrange market and when you have people wanting to go High Def and they look at a HD-DVD player and a BR player and are well they both play 1080i/p, they think they say i don't want to spend that extra money because he/she does not see any immediate benefit to spending that extra money. So whoever can appeal to the mass market first will gain the majority although i don't see either format dying a quick death i think there will definitely be a favored choice among common consumers soon enough.
@IcBlUsCrn
I think you are throwing $5 around a little to liberally. I mean after i buy 5 HD-DVD movies rather than Blu-Ray movies that will have saved me $25 giving me enough saved money to go out and buy another HD-DVD movie. If there was a $1 discrepancy i wouldn't mention it but when both Blu-Ray players and Blu-Ray discs are more expensive the price is not to be taken lightly when its storage capacity benefit has no real market effect right now.
The fact that we are now on page 4 of arguments posted on a forum populated by very astute technophiles who cannot begin to agree does not bode well for any sort of near term resolution. How many installed units will it take to see an outcome -100million+? There are very complex issues. Compression, 480, 720, 1080, i., p, upscalability, downscalability, DRM. At the end of the day, Lisa the banker, John the mechanic, Laura the whosaler want to get home, pop some sort of disk into some sort of machine hooked up to some sort of display and get a better video experience than dvd. (And that statement may be faulty because most people think dvd is just fine, thank you very much, despite the fact that 1 in 500 know the difference between dvd+ and dvd-) Whatever format can produce a player/recorder that takes 20 minutes to set up out of the box and attach to a display/monitor/television using simple language directions and will play hd quality videos from 480 to 1080 without any worries about "handshakes", upscaling the downscaling, mutually exclusive DRM protocols or any of the other stuff that you and I love to talk/b*%$c about, will win. Based on what we are seeing, I suspect we have at least 3-5 more years af a very fragmented format market, with buyers becoming more and more frustrated and confused. What would be a real shame is that the outcome could very well be tens of millions of people saying "fuggedaboudit" and sticking with the current standard and relegating HD players to hobbyist only status.
Seems sony has been good at suing people into poverty to progress thier own agenda. seems rather bully to me.
Very unlikely anyone's been sued into poverty, the settlements for people have been in the 3k range iirc. Not exactly cheap, but not nearly as bad as the penalties posted on every DVD and CD.
Frankly I don't care about either format, all the early adapters of HD got shafted since they don't have HDMI w/ HDCP, half the owners of current players are going to get shafted as only one of the two formats can be sustained, and the prices go up on everything with very little added value (unless you have a 42" or larger screen with HDMI and even then the value is arguable). I'm not buying High Def DVD's until everything gets sorted, fact is reguar definition is plenty for me considering I watch three quarters of my dvd's on a laptop...
) and not one sales person even mentioned matching it with a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. I think part of the blame can be placed on retailers not educating their people, but most of the blame should be put on the respective camps.
