The Long Good

The Long Good Friday

Congratulations on pointing out the Blu Ray mugging. Some journalists seem to have been under the misapprehension that Blur Ray won in a fair competition on its merits. Unlike Betamax versus VHS there was never a free market decision. Sony was both a provider of content and of hardware and the thing that did HD DVD in was the limited choice of DVDs after the majority of studios supported the more expensive format. One is reminded of Adam Smith: two businessmen never meet without conspiring against the public. Now that there is not even a vestige of competition expect prices for Blu Ray players to stay high as will prices for the Blu Ray DVDs. Personally I shall stick with my upconverting standard DVD player. If and when sufficient interesting films are issued in Blu Ray at a more reasonable price I may reconsider. A few people have commented here that they plan to buy a HD-DVD player and/or take advantage of anticipated bargain prices on remaindered movies. Toshiba is unlikely to continue support spare parts for the players for any great length of time, since relatively few were sold. If you buy a player, and a bunch of cheap HD-DVDs, youre likely to end up with an unrepairable machine and a shelf full of expensive coasters in a few years. If you dont believe this, try and get a Beta vcr repaired. Blue ray will do fine for probably 10-15 years. Theres not enough bandwidth for the entire country to start downloading HD format. And even if it was The Long Good Friday to download, what are the odds that Sony who put rootkits on audio CDs is going to make it easy to burn? I doubt more than 1% of homes have their computer connected to their tv and nobody is The Long Good Friday to be in a rush to figure out how to do that. I was waiting on the sideline for awhile but between the two. I picked Bluray. Why? Well, because I knew that Capacity is king. HD-DVD was already at the max and theres just no more room to grow. In this digital age space is never enough. After doing a lot of reading on the net. I finally picked up PS3 and it will be BD final spec ready when Sony release the firmware.