Blu Ray over/under $

Personally do not think Blu Ray vs HD-DVD format war will be lengthy and difficult as some make it out to be: Blu Ray will be the clear winner. Not necessarily due to quality etc but industry movement & dynamics. Blu Ray has all the big consumer elec companies behind it Sony, Masushita, Samsung, LG etc plus DELL, HP etc as well as from the content companies. HD DVD has a weak consortium led by Toshiba who has its own structural problems as a company. The only way HD DVD becomes the big winner is if a) X Box 360 gets HUGE lead over all other next generation game consoles (highly unlikely) and simulataneously Microsoft and Intel stay away and continue to not support Blu Ray. I doubt it.

Thanks Ears...just as I suspected. The key thing is ability & motivations of the two consortiums. HD-DVD camp is led by Toshiba OK, but the two other important mfrs are NEC and Sanyo. NEC is already hedging its bets and purchased a 45% equity stake in a Sony Blu Ray JV. Sanyo is going through a large restructuring excecise due to a lack of profitability. Also note that its not just about DVDs and home entertainment but high capacity storage in recorders and PCs: HP, Dell and Sony are from the IT side of the equations supporting Blu Ray with many others as well all leaning that way. Microsoft is supporting HD DVD for now but only as an optional add on to X Box 360 and the primary reason for supporting it is to battle PS3: but their key issue is market share of X Box itself and narrowing the gap: besides all lose money on the game machines and make money on the games themselves with the long-term objective making these game machines the center of home entertainment systems and digital home at large: thus the standard of Optical Disk Drives is less of a strategic issue for Microsoft and they will end up supporting both as add ons if needed. But for Blu Ray, Sony has developed it and spend R&D etc: there is much more committment: note also Sony is market leader in the ODD market at large: its not just about DVD players. Finally for Intel, again may not a big issue anyway: X Box, Ps3 and the upcoming Nintendo's Revolution all moved from Intel to IBM architecture anyway.

So expect a war during 2006-7 but ultimately the writing is on the wall.

Agree with that Rysa4...early on it ain't gonna be pretty.

with regard to the "average consumer"...yes they really do not care for high quality audio playback...or perhaps they have become so for a variety of reasons and certainly put much more value on flexibility, portability, storage and convenience....but the same may not be the case for video quality: if it is readily apparent which most seem to state with regard to HD then the adoption may much faster than e think and at least have much larger success than SACD, analogue LP, DVD-A.

P3 launch is likely to be delayed