Has Blu-ray already won?

[Jim L]

And the day that Blu-ray titles available exceed those on HD-DVD, it will add more momentum to the Blu-ray adoption rate.

From reading the AVS Forums (I know . . . I should stay out of there) I can tell that there is some discontent on the HD-DVD side with hardware. Their only choice is really Toshiba (or RCA). From what I hear, the Toshiba outputs a great picture, but a good number of owners say it still has several glitches even after the latest firmware update. I don't think I could tolerate a player that locks up or stutters as often as I hear they do. I don't hear these kinds of complaints from Sammy and Panny owners.

When the Blu-ray side will have 3 (or more) quality players to choose from it will be a compelling argument to prospective adopters. The Panny, Sony, and Pioneer players will look, function, and perform like quality pieces of home theater equipment (instead of what some Toshiba owners have called a clunky box of old laptop parts). Sure, they will all cost more than an HD-DVD player but early adopters aren't entirely price driven. Personally, I would rather have something that is nice looking and functions smoothly in my setup than something that is $500 cheaper. You do get what you pay for!

Soon there won't be a whole lot for the HD-DVD folks to cling to.
Their early advantages are being knocked off one by one:

• First to market - HD-DVD had many advantages with this, but with Blu-ray in full launch mode now the publicity and interest should shift to Blu-ray.
• Greater title selection - Blu-ray is quickly catching up (I think less than 20 titles behind now) and will soon pass HD-DVD. With only Universal going full tilt they can't hope to compete with Sony/Fox/Disney/MGM when they all turn on the pipeline
• Cheaper players - The PS3 is an inexpensive alternative player and the Samsung is now being discounted heavily (~$600).
• Better video quality in transfers - Blu-ray transfers have improved from all studios. I'll bet that Fox now has the best transfers on any format. They took the crown on D-Theater. I don't see how anything could look better than X-3 or LXG.
• Better sound quality - with LPCM on more discs, Blu-ray has the edge here. There's more to come with DTS-HDMA from Fox.
• Capacity advantage - now that Blu-ray can release large quanitites of BD-50s on many titles the advantage is now Blu-ray's.
• Interactivity advantage - I'm interested to see how BD-J will be used on future titles. I think Fox is only scratching the surface so far. HD-DVD is ahead in this area, but not for long.
• Movie disc prices - I'm hoping that with recorders, laptops, and PS3 media being produced it will help Blu-ray achieve more economies of scale which could help lower disc production costs. I doubt that we'll see much passed on in movie prices. Right now the average price for either format is about the same.