Why Blu-ray will win - by Ben Drawbaugh

[hmurchison]

Originally Posted by Brian@BBY

Lite-On...Acer....are you kidding me? nobody even knows who they are

Lite-On is huge in the OEM space. Sony has OEM'd a few drives from them.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Revi...rticleId=16894

Most of Sony's optical drives are OEM, from various manufacturers such as Optorite in the past, LiteOn mostly but also BenQ. This time, as it happened with the previous Sony drive that we reviewed a couple of months ago, the DW-G120A is an LiteOn OEM SHM-165P6S.

Acer is quickly becoming a leader world supplier of LCD, Notebookds and Desktops.

http://www.displaysearch.com/press/?id=292

Acer in 2005 was just behind Dell, Samsung and HP with LG pulling in at 5th. Consumers don't know who these Billion Dollar companies are because the bulk of their profits come from the OEM space. So...you've been buying Lite-On and LG drives for years and never knew it because there was a "Sony" or "HP" emblazoned on the front.

Originally Posted by Brian@BBY

Last time I checked, I used NTSC and lived in the US. "there will be new hardware there" that doesn't mean here. I think you invest too much faith in the HDDVD side

I clearly prefaced my statement with discussion centered around the Euro launch giving us an indicator of how the hardware should evolve. It should point to where other 3rd party vendors will at hardwarewise as well. I haven't tried to correlate the Euro hardware with a North Am launch.

Originally Posted by ProvenFlipper

So yes, there are customers that shop on price, but there are tons of other customers out there that aren't buying into HD-DVD due to the fact that they only have one company so far making the equipment, and one exclusive movie studio

Yes I've often heard 'Sony's the best" from the more uniformed consumers who buy into expensive marketing campaigns part and parcel. There are Sony fans and I don't expect that to change. I do think that the studio issue is overblown. One major studio is HD DVD exclusive but there are smaller studios as well and that content is going to be important to some people.