It's Beta-max vs. VHS all over again
 

After much posturing and attempts at negotiation, the first official shots in the next generation DVD war have been fired. Toshiba has announced plans to sell a HD DVD player in March (backwards compatible with current DVDs), while Sony, Fox, and Lionsgate have annonced a handful of DVD titles which they will be releasing in Blu-ray format exclusively, the competitor to HD DVD. The titles will, of course, still be available in the current standard DVD format as well.

Personally, I'm going to sit back and let the dust settle. I'm not one to jump on these kinds of emerging technologies. They're buggy, over-priced, and in this case there's a 50% chance of near-term obsolesence. I'll wait until one goes the way of the Laserdisc.

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I'm with you. Wait and see. All I know is that I'm not rebuying my movies yet again: Beta --> VHS --> DVD. No thanks.
:)

VHS --> Laserdisc --> DVD for this filmgeekboy.

I don't give a hoot about increased picture quality at this point, or room for more extras. My TV - that I cannot afford to replace - won't display things any better anyway. And until I replace every one of my laserdiscs with a more modern format, I'm not willing to part with the only player that can play both lasers and DVDs.

No bite from me this time. Go fish.

Read as "releasing in Blurry format".

We never ended up with many video tapes but we jumped full into DVD collecting. I'm not interesting in starting over. I'm still waiting for obscure titles to be released on DVD. I'm a part of the wait and see crowd as well.

Ah to recollect the current collection - yeah it's a ways off, as is the HDTV we'll need to play them on.

We still have our Laser Disc. Spent $800 on the sucker (Pioneer Elite). It's been acting funny so I gotta see how many of the movies I can burn to DVD (recently acquired a DVD recorder).

BTW: I just noticed that the title of the thread is incorrect. It should read "Betamax vs. VHS".

And FWIW: Betamax never actually completely died - it is still used quite a bit in professional video.

Oops, went a bit brain dead there.

And yeah yeah, whatever about video editing, it's the consumer market we're talking about here.

As a comsumer, I stick by the fact that the quality of the Betamax picture was/is far superior to VHS. (That's why lots of TV shows etc used it to record long into the 90's and early 00's.)
:)

Heheh, however ... DVD was a big improvement over laserdisc.

(Although, I miss the way laserdisc movies would simply BEGIN when you inserted the disc. No menus, no commercials, no THX trailer, often no FBI warning. Ah, simpler times. Far fewer extras, but I appreciated the way I could geekly replicate a movie-going experience.)