Sony's Track Record

[Blue]

CobaltBlue, I agree on Sony's developments. Excellent research and even better acknowledging it.
However don’t overlook Sony’s successes, Umatic*, 3.5” floppy disk* just to mention a few. Trust me I’m not a Sony fanboy, the only Sony item I have is a PC DVD Burner, but credit has to be given where credit is due.

I think this was one of many reasons that Sony joined Philips to bring us the CD. They have again joined forces with Philips and to really make sure have got Panansonic, Pioneer, JVC and nearly every other CE company in Japan. They didn't forget about that other powerhouse of CE being South Korea with Samsung, LG and others. So in this case I think Toshiba is the odd man out (OK and their almost silent partner NEC).
I agree there can only be one format at the end of the day, but I can't see HD-DVD and Blu Ray being dumped in favour of another, even though I can feel the blood pressure of the holographic group rising.

As for the extra processing power Most of the enhancements are traceability and dynamic updates along with a few other tricks as the heart of the copy protection is AACS (Same as in HD-DVD) http://www.physorg.com/news5725.html although not doubting the Tom's article it may have been a copy from an article published by another source and their are plenty of them around, just have a look at some of the other threads here.

I agree HD-DVD has the edge on releases, but Fox, Disney and MGM are about to enter guns blazing all of which are at this point in time exclusive to Blu Ray. Remember HD-DVD has been out longer than Blu Ray - infact I suspect Blu Ray hasn't really been launched, Samsung is there as a what you can do we can do. Pioneer, Sony and Panasonic are about add what you can do we can do better (especially the Panasonic 4x recorder) but as they say time will tell.

* Sony