I'm glad I didn't pay any more than $100 for our HD-DVD player a few months ago!! We also purchased a PS3 recently so we have a combination of HD and Blu-Ray movies (most of the HD movies were free with the purchase of the player so I don't have too much invested).
What I like about the HD-DVD player is that it upconverts so we can play our standard DVD's in it and get an HD quality picture so I'm not disappointed about the purchase even though Toshiba has since pulled the plug.
The whole "upsampling" thing is kind of bogus marketing IMHO. Your basic HDTV has one single native resolution, and
everything that is shown on that TV is displayed at that resolution. If your TV is 1080p (or even 1080i), then your resolution is almost certainly 1920x1080, and everything is shown at 1920x1080, including 1280x720 high-def content, 720x480 DVDs, 480x480 satellite/cable television, etc.
Everything.
The theoretical advantage of an "upsampling" DVD player is that it can upscale the picture better than your TV can. Maybe it can, maybe it can't - that all depends on which has the better scaler. (Faroudja (probably misspelled
) is the usual "good one".) There may also be a slight advantage if you use a DVI or HDMI connection to your TV in that the picture stays in digital format, but I'm not sure that that's going to make a really big deal compared to a good component connection (or even S-video) for DVD-level video.
That being said, I'm pretty sure that BluRay players do the same upsampling.
Didn't they win out with Trinitron, Beta, and Digital Audio Tapes (DAT)?
Trinitron wasn't a format therefore wasn't in a format way. Beta got killed by VHS due to VHS's 6-hour capacity vs 4.5 for Beta (although Beta lived on in professional markets like television due to its higher quality). I don't think DAT really competed against anything, but it was certainly never a big success in the consumer field.
On the failure side, there's Minidiscs (though again, I can't think of anything they specifically competed with, but consumers never got interested), and SACD (which did compete with DVD-Audio but in this case, consumers don't care about either one, just like they didn't care about DTS CDs.)
But I don't think it's fair to paint Sony as big losers. Look at the success of the Walkman, their A/V equipment, and the Playstation and Playstation 2 just destroyed all competition. The PS3 is off to a slow start but it appears to be picking up a lot of steam, and I've heard some talk that this is really going to be the year of the PS3, and that was
before BluRay won the battle - which will only help it.
Boomhauer, most big movies were released in BluRay already. Universal and Paramount were the big hold-outs, and Universal has already stated that they'll be switching to BluRay soon. Paramount recently accepted $150 million to be HD-DVD exclusive for a period of time, but my understanding is that Toshiba's announcement frees them from this contract and they'll have to be supporting BluRay very soon. I'd say that there's little danger of any current HD-DVD exclusives not being released for BluRay in the near future.
