Poll: So, what are you HD DVD early adopters going to do?
By Darren Murph 
posted February 16th 2008 12:40PM
posted February 16th 2008 12:40PM
posted February 16th 2008 12:40PM
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Im getting a LG GGW-H20L 6X INTERNAL SUPER MULTI BLUE BLU-RAY DISC
REWRITER & HD DVD-ROM DRIVE
http://us.lge.com/products/model/detail/computer%20products_optical%20drives_optical%20drives_GGW-H20L.jhtml
I bought the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive and about 15 HD DVD titles, and
since I will be moving to Blu-ray
for my HD media source, it's good to know that I'll have my "old" HD
DVD titles along with future Blu-ray titles to watch on my Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP 30-inch. The Blu-ray
burning capabilities is nice to boot!
I have a ps3 and 360 with hd dvd drive. I will stock up on hd dvd movies I have wanted when the clearance sells start. We may as well make the best of it. this my be the first time this hd format war has benefited use costumers, or at least me with cheap movies.
I am not sorry that I was an early adaptor of HD-DVD. It cost me very little for the XBOX adaptor and I rarely bought a disk for more then $20.00. I have been able to enjoy the Matrix, Transformers, Bourne Trilogy and other HD-DVD only disks.
In fact, I own more disks then I have had time to watch. I continue to get HD-DVD disks from Blockbuster (for how long who knows).
Once I run out of HD-DVD disks to watch then I will consider getting a BD player. However, dispite the PS3 being the best BD player I have avoided it because it requires a special remote.
My hope is that when I need to buy a BD player they will be up to par with what I already have with HD-DVD and as cheap. I can only hope. :)
My PC now has an LG combo burner and I plan to back up my existing HD-DVD library to Blu-ray media. Of course, this won't happen until I replace my Toshiba HD-A30 with a Blu-ray component player...which won't happen until they reach the current HD-DVD price point...which won't happen for a while.
I saw the final battle go down and got a clip of it.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj145/mr_fizzlepop/BluVSHDDVD.gif
I'll enjoy my $99 upscaling dvd player that also plays HD-DVDs! Oh, and buy the deeply discounted HD-DVDs.
i bought a few hd-dvd movies but in combo format when amazon had em on sale. i wanted the titles anyway... i never got a player because i was waiting for prices to drop a little more for red. I wanted to get a purple player eventually
never really cared which one won, but the idea of a combo disc was nice because it played anywhere.
I plan to buy up any HD-DVD title I can still get my hands on. Chances are that the prices will drop drastically as retailers try to get money out of current stock. I am very sad that HD-DVD did not make a better showing. But I refuse to sell what I got just because Blu Ray will be the only option. I will continue to use my Xbox 360 HD-DVD player as long as I can.
Big f'n deal. What am I going to do??? Buy a Blu-ray player and move on. It's not a hard decision...and not a big deal. Get a set of balls and deal with real problems.
Losers
I bought the HD-A2 at Wal-Mart as well for $98 and only have around 8 or 9 movies in HD-DVD format. I'm not too steamed about HD-DVD losing the format war, and I'm not really bothered that the format will be obsolete effective almost immediately. I am confident that my A2 unit will last for a long, long time and I don't imagine I'll be buying many HD-DVD's even on close-out; maybe a few but not too many. I have 400+ plain vanilla DVDs that will continue to be played through the A2 over its' lifespan, and I'm in no hurry to replace it with a Blu-Ray player right now. No rush at all, as in my mind I feel like Blu-Ray still needs to overcome the strength of plain vanilla DVD before I will likely buy a Blu-Ray player of any sort. There's no great incentive to do so right now.
A logical approach would be to just wait out the storm between Blu and DVD - who knows, perhaps something else will emerge, downloadable movies on a PC or the Apple Take 2 could emerge as viable. It's pointless to speculate how things will level out right now because there is nothing very clear-cut other than the fact that HD-DVD is a dying, endangered species.
My recommendation to Microsoft is that if they want to keep their 360 viable against the PS3 that they IMMEDIATELY develop a Blu-Ray-compatible version of the 360 to get on the level with PS3. No add-on drives!!! I had a 360 at one point but the desire to own an add-on HD drive was less than desirable... who wants yet another box to stack up? Integration is critical to keep the 360 successful, and I'd probably buy a Blu-Ray-equipped 360 before I ever thought about buying a Sony PS3. The catalog of games with the 360 is enough to sway my vote, plus I would rather not give my money to Sony, whose products in the past have performed with less-than-stellar impressiveness to me.
In the long run, I'm not out much money, and I'm not going to waste my time now crying over spilt milk.
My wife and I will bite the bullet for now. We finally made the decision to upgrade to HD on Dec 26th with a Samsung HDTV and Toshiba HD DVD player because of the heavy discounts. We will not be buying the HD DVDs, choosing to play our existing media on the Toshiba. After the pricing comes down to a reasonable amount, we may make the jump to Blu-Ray.
Everyone keeps harping on "oh, it's fine until digital downloads are ready to fly"... can someone talk to me about the issue with network capacity and the 5GB caps that some providers are putting on their networks?
"You can download one low-def movie this month, then run at 64K/sec until next month".
Yeah, that's going to work out well...
might be the losing side...still not convinced it was the wrong one.
I won the format war..
how?
I didn't buy into either till the dust was going to settle.
Don't have to be 1st on my block.
I got a Betamax, cheap, if anybody's interested. First Beta Hi-Fi I found. It's the superior format!
I am not that interested in Blu Ray. My tastes in movies goes to a lot of old stuff, so I am wondering whether I can pick up a good HD DVD player that will do a very good job of upscaling my present collection of good old DVD format movies.
In time (assuming that physical distribution continues to be relevant) I may purchase a Blu Ray player.
I'm sticking with standard def DVD. Rip them to MP4 and stream them across the network to the HD-TV. It might not be crystal clear but it looks good enough and they're about ten dollars cheaper on average than the Hi-Def disks. I've had a PS3 for almost a year now and I have yet to buy one Hi-Def disk for it. I've bought about twenty standard def DVDs in that time.
I'm pretty sure Sony wasn't selling Betamax players but Beta SP and Digital Betacam. These were professional formats that were the mainstream until the HD cameras came into their own. I wouldn't expect this to happen to HD-DVD. The reports claim that Toshiba is shutting down the factory, so that doesn't sound like there will be support for long....
Im actually really upset that blu-ray is coming out on top. I have a 360 with the hd player which cost me $50 at best buy, and a ps3. Im also writing on a vaio right now so im very impartial. How ever I have noticed that there is honestly a visible difference in the 2 formats. in comparing the same titles HDDVD always looked way sharper. and the blu-ray format was in 1080p where the HDDVD was in 1080i and still looked better.
I currently have a PS3 which i just purchased in Feb. Since the initial purchase i have used the system for far much more then just a game console. i have the 40gb version and i have saved some dr. suess movies on it, uploaded pictures, and all my music from my computer. use it to go online while in the living room and not forget play some pretty good games. not to mention if you use a media server like orb on your pc, it will automatically upload and you have access to all your media on your ps3. yeah sony doesnt have the plethera of games the 360 has right now but in time sony will surpass, as it always does. the 360 is a great system if you like first person shooters in my book. both are good systems but for the price i need an all purpose system to replace all extra boxes and it does it all well.
I'll keep buying HD DVDs until their completely gone. I have WAY too many Blu-Ray titles that were encoded in MPEG2 and look like garbage to make my HD DVD player obsolete. Italian Job on HD DVD is the perfect example. When you watch both side by side, it concerns me that Blu-Ray was ignorant enough to use MPEG2 at all. The only reason they use VC-1 and AVC now is because HD DVD had such a superior picture when it initially came out. I'll always buy an HD DVD over a Blu-Ray title when given the chance. Obviously, that will only last for so long. Lets just hope Blu-Ray doesn't make any other ridiculous decisions like that (BDi???) in the future because they won't have HD DVD to get ideas from anymore. Cheers!
Whats wrong with DVD's of today standard, sure your limited as to size of storage so film company's can only fit so much on them comparied to Blue-Ray disks but they are so sharp you need a really good contrasted TV (15000:1) to really appreaciate the quality of Blue-Ray/HD-DVD! otherwise it's a waist of money just to watch it on a HD-ready LCD TV sure you can watch them but is that the point of it?
I personally are going to always have normal DVDs theres nothing wrong with them.
I'm going back to good old DVD's. I picked up an A3 when they were cheap and have picked up a few movies, but nothing crazy. It does a good job upconverting dvd's to look decent and I'm not going to buy blueray until there are commodity priced DB player's on the market (for me that is under $150) that are reliable and support most of the features.
kcmurphy88...
Sony didn't sell BetaMax machines for its "millions of customers". They sold it because it was the superior format for television production. Every TV studio on earth used SuperBeta players and recorders as well as SuperBeta cameras. The consumer market for BetaMax was non existent.
HD-DVD doesn't fall into that category, no one will be making an HD-DVD player in 2-3 years.. nevermind 20.
I'll be bargain shopping for lots of HD DVD titles since i'm already knee deep. Might as well take advantage of the dying format and pick up stuff when it gets cheap, right?
Eventually 'invest' in BluRay, probably via a PS3 and burner/reader for the desktop.
Funny story, I bough an HD DVD player and a few movies and had only had it a couple of weeks when Warner made it's announcement. I no longer had the box for the player as it had been recycled, but after a call to Best Buy they told me I could bring it back for a full weekend without the box if I had a receipt. I did have the receipt so that's what I did. Once they mailed me my refund check since they couldn't give me a full refund in the store, I now own a Sony Blu Ray player.
I haven't gone with either, yet, being a poor college student. However, call me crazy, but I plan on buying a HD-DVD player and discs on eBay once they hit the Dirt Cheap mark - which sould be within a couple weeks, frankly. I'll get some high-falutin' ripper to put them all on my media system, and who cares which player I have then? I'll also get a Blu-Ray player once it hits the Almost Dirt Cheap mark, but I prefer classic movies to most new ones out. The Matrix is available on HD-DVD. What else do I neeed, honestly?
Stick with standard DVD until it dies :)
Guess it's back to a waiting game for me. I have about 17 movies (5 were free) and I only paid $150 for my player.
A few years from now when Sony gets real and starts pricing players at $150 and below (or some other company does), I will probably switch.
I really wanted them to lose though. They charge way too much for all their crap. I HATE thinking that I will be putting cash in Sony's coffers for their money-grubbing royalty fees, and you can bet the market would have been better off with a non-Sony format. Heck, PS2's are still over $100!! Sony sucks.
The PS3 is only popular because of Blu-Ray (look at their game attach rate), and they used their gaming audience to drown out the fact that most next-gen consumers were much more interested in the equally-capable and less-expensive HD-DVD.
Lose-lose for the consumer. At least I'm only out a couple hundred bucks. If I had chosen Sony and been in this position, I would have lost $800.
I have bolth consols and for first person shooters xbox 360 is the way to go. I also didnt buy a ps3 till was able to afford the HD tv to go along with it. I did buy the 80 gig just to get the backward compatability all thought they are saying that they will make most of the ps2 catalog downloadable for a decent price wich is better then nothing. It dose annopy me the idea of buying a game I have paid for before but if it is under 10 bucks i can deal with it. I have to tell you the truth i perfer my ps3 over my 360. Yes xbox live is 20 times more advanced at this point then the PSN but the ps3 is a much nicer experiance. I like the way sony dose things better over all. Pluse the playstion exclusives like ratchet and clank always make it worth the buy. Thats my 2 cents.
Buying any kind of optical disc player at this point in time is adopting too early. Within a year Netflix will be streaming HD quality content to your 360 and probably your PS3. I'm not going to waste my money on some tech that will be out of date in a year or two. Let's get real, broadband streaming is the way all your media will be delivered before too long.
It's a pity I bet the wrong horse, but the price was and remains, right. I am going to keep what I have, and proabably buy an A-35, putting my A2 as backup in case the A35 breaks. The A2 has been absolutely fine, and I am not planning on going blind any time soon, so the discs I have presently (about 25) will do me just fine until Sony gets its act together by making the audio and video at least as good as, if not better than HD-DVD and at a price that won't break the bank. I don't need a game machine. I need a HD video player, kinda like the one I got now from Toshiba.
Well, because the BD players are still too expensive (for my budget), and it won't get any cheaper anytime soon.
I guess i will just have to wait for a couple years and see what happen. In the mean time, i will look for on the internet and see if there is a utility that will convert BD to HD-DVD format and keep using my HD-DVD player.
Not all is lost though, cause the HD-DVD is capable of playing and upconverting regulars DVDs.
After installing firmware update 2.4, my XA1 ceased playing any HD DVCD with a menu. Upon calling T-bah custserv, I was advised to buy a new machine. This was a month ago when they clearly knew they were going out of the business. I wonder how many shares of SONY they sucked up in the interim. Dante should have reserved another circle in the Inferno for such thieves.
OK. I got scammed. Oh please. Where do I sign up to get scammed again?
Headline from next year's CES: "Major studios announce plans to downplay Blu-ray releases as sales continue to disappointed."
I'm going to keep writing to Toshiba to ask them to upgrade the firmware so I can use networking capabilities in my A30 to stream media from my pc.