Blu-Ray Wins: But Is It Good For Consumers? (Hint: No!)

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It’s over. The battle is won.

There will be one format for high-definiton DVDs and it will be… Blu-Ray.

But, is good news for the industry good news for consumers?

The CBC’s national technology correspondent Tod Maffin thinks not.

Posted February 21, 2008

Comments

Comments

2 Responses to “Blu-Ray Wins: But Is It Good For Consumers? (Hint: No!)”

Laurent LaSalle on February 25th, 2008 11:39 am

It’s not good for [a] consumer, yourself! ;oP

For once I happen to have chosen the winning side of things. But even if I would have lost, you have to know that it was all a gamble before a definitive standard format was chosen…
Kalev Hunt on February 26th, 2008 9:32 pm

My understanding was that HD-DVD region encoding was just a matter of time (i.e. it hadn’t been included initially because HD-DVD had been rushed out the door but that there was no way studios were going to leave things region-free) and that the whiz-bang menu and bookmark features you mention HD-DVDs having will soon be available on Blu-ray as new versions of their specs come along.

I have to disagree with your premise that the higher capacity doesn’t matter. I think it might not matter so much now but going forward I think it’ll prove to have been the better choice. It’ll definitely be a boon when TV seasons are commonly collected in HD.

My problem with HD-DVD is that Microsoft supported it, plain and simple. To me, Microsoft is more evil than Sony, so I’m quite happy to see them lose. Plus Microsoft was seriously moronic not to have included HD-DVD playback native in their most recent XBOX360 revisions. I think the fact the PS3 can play Blu-ray movies right out of the box (without the $200 add-on required to get HD-DVDs to play on the XBOX360) probably helped settle the matter.

Even before the big 2-studio defection from HD-DVD in January, I had a sense Blu-ray was poised to win when I noticed tech stores stocking writeable Blu-ray discs in the noticeable absence of similar media in the HD-DVD format.

But perhaps more than anything, I got a free Blu-ray player with my HDTV purchase, so I’m sitting pretty.