As a huge Audio/Videophile, I hate to agree with the naysayers but Sony has a notoriously bad track record on developing their innovative technologies. This is just a quick reminder to put the fanboys in check. I'm not crticizing technical capabilities, merely implementation...
*Betamax- *cough cough* how'd that last big format battle go again?
*MiniDisc- I kept waiting for this to, rightfully, replace cd as a realistic and durable solution. Yup, still waiting.
*Memory Stick-"few other manufacturers are also making use of this technology"
*HiFD- yeah, I never heard of it either. It's competitor Zip did pretty well though.
*SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound)- "Ultimately, SDDS has been vastly overshadowed by the preferred DTS (Digital Theatre System) and Dolby Digital standards"
*ATRAC- do people own ATRAC or MP3 players?
*Elcaset- another dead proprietary audio format.
*SACD- Relevant as a recent Hi-def format war and my favorite example as an audiophile. Sony develops a superior audio technology (yes, even in comparison to vinyl) and then releases a handful (I'm being generous) of albums per year and advertises... wait, that's right I never saw any. Thank god for third party releases. DVD-Audio seems to have kind-of? won this format war. The end result being a public largely ignorant that either exists at all. Thanks to bad implentation and the rise of crappy but compressed MP3's, the music we listen to is at the same or worse quality(media-wise) it was in the 80's.
Lastly,
*MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD)- never had one of these did you? That's because Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed upon Toshiba's SD format. This became the DVD we know and love.
Sony has never been what I would call consumer friendly (2005 rootkit debacle anyone?). Though my love of games and movies has me eager to have HD and Blu-ray, my response (and others) might be to hold off until these idiots consider their customers, go back to the drawing board and come back with a unified format. One way or another we'll get one and not everyone is clamoring for a PS3... so that doesn't guarantee success other than in use as another proprietary Sony format for their products(a'la UMD). So far it looks like HD has the edge of releases, and if the price is reasonable for the Xbox360 add-on drive, there's a difficult decision coming for budget concious movie watching gamers. If the choices are HD drive and Halo3(that's right, I dropped the H-bomb) vs. a new PS3...
Also, I'd like to pose a question to those more knowledgable...
According to tomshardware.com and other tech savy sources, decoding encryption on new Hi-def media is going to give even recent dual core processors in pc's a hard time. Upon Sony's insistence, Blu-ray has stronger encryption from what I've read. Will HD-dvd's cause less of a performance hit on a pc than Blu-ray? If so, I think that is a pretty important consideration as well.
CobaltBlue
*Most info taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony#Proprietary_formats