There may only be a price difference at the very beginning. From what I understand in the industry's One-To-One magazine, the players won't have significant price differences. What will have the price differences initially are the costs of the discs themselves (though Sony denies this).

The reason is because existing replication equipment can be easier adapted for HD DVD. Blu-Ray requires more investment, which will most likely lead to higher prices at first.

If HD DVD wins, it will be because of price, and price alone. But the way the news sounds, more studios are backing Blu-Ray than are backing HD DVD. That means a lot. As weird as it sounds, the porn industry will end up being the ones having the most say. Whichever one they decide to back will most likely be the winner because of the tremendous economic impact the porn industry has.

Consumers won't be the ones determining the winner of this war.

Err, umm.....

Gotta disagree with you on this one. I won't make a prediction about which will win, but in the end, it will be consumers that decide it. All the exact same arguments were made for beta-max. Studio support, better technology, eventual price convergence, yadda yadda. But if the consumer wants nothing to do with it, it's going nowhere.

Ohh and from a more technical point of view...

What are you going to play full res Blue-Ray DVD's on anyway? There are not a lot of 1080p TV set's in living rooms yet and for the few that do have them they all have HDMI ports that cannot handle 1080p.

That reminds me; I gotta pee

The discs do have a manufacturing price... a few cents apiece, and are extremely marked up from there. A couple pennies per disc makes a big difference when you are pumping out large quantities.

I highly doubt that a consumer would want nothing to do with it. Higher capacity is always coming down the road... 5.25 gave way to 3.5, which gave way to CD, which is giving way to DVD, which will give way to either HD DVD or Blu-Ray.

With that said, I firmly believe that the porn industry will choose the winner. I heard a report on NPR a couple years ago that the porn industry is stronger than the average person thinks, and has had its say over many multimedia formats over the years.

Again, I make no predictions on which one will be adopted. You may be absolutely right, this time the public, being more tech-savy as a whole than 30 years ago, may be won over by the better technical specs. Then again, maybe not.

But in the end, it is a 100% guarantee that if consumers want nothing to do with with one of the two for whatever reason, it will fail.

Does anybody still make 8 tracks? I haven't been to the music store in a while and my Helen Reddy is getting a little overplayed.

I recently bought a HDTV and decided to save a grand by going for 720p over 1080p. I do admit that I am in love with the set (if I wasn't already married...) and I often find myself watching HD versions of things that I would have passed on in SD. I went out and bought a DVD player that upscales SD DVDs with a Faroudja processor so I can at least not lose any quality when watching 'em on a big screen.

However excited I am by the upcoming hi-definition DVDs, I have to remind myself of all of the formats I've seen come and go through the last couple of decades. Anyone remember MiniDiscs? What about the very recent SACDs? When I worked for Island Records, we were pulled into a meeting to hear about Philips' new DCCs. We were told that the amount of money being invested in this technology meant that they were sure to succeed. Right.

Like other posters in this thread - I am thrilled at the idea of a new format that improves upon the existing available one. And I'll probably start buying the media a month or two after it becomes available (and the player prices break the $200 barrier) - but there's no way I'm going to play armchair quarterback and try to predict which format will out. The only thing that's certain is that the experts are almost always wrong.

DIVX, anyone?

Other than the boneheads evangelizing the format (and the unfortunate few suits who headed major studios), did anyone really think DIVX was going to make it?