Why is One Format Better??

[ZX-VETTE]

Originally Posted by dakota81

Competition between formats improve them... but only up until they hit the consumer market. At that point neither format improves at all, and only leads to consumer confusion and fear of buying obsolete equipment.

I agree with most of your post, but not the above. Competition is still a factor after products (or formats) hit the market. An example in this case would be some of the bad transfers on Blu-Ray (i.e. House of Flying Daggers) early on. It seems like after the initial complaints and also high video scores for HD-DVD, the Blu-Ray transfers were addressed which has resulted in a much better product.

Another example would be the xBox vs PS3. There's now the xBox Elite. Without the PS3 there wouldn't have been an xBox Elite.