Blu-ray Wins By Default

It appears that in the battle of the formats, Toshiba America has finally thrown in the towel, and announced that they will be discontinuing their HD DVD format players/recorders, giving the Blu-Ray format backed by Sony the match by default.

Quite a few people are upset given that they purchased player/recorders and XBox’s with HD DVD heavily last year and for Christmas in anticipation of many more titles to come, and now the big retailers such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy, and movie studios like Universal and Paramount have said they will follow Toshiba’s lead, and drop providing new stuff in HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray. Owners of the pretty much now-defunct format are saying they would have gone PS3 instead if Toshiba could have admitted they lost the format wars way back when instead of making sure they were able to sell of existing inventory at full price for the holidays.

However, Toshiba has stated that no refunds will be in the offing. (Just as in the fight game, you don’t get your money back just because your boxer lost the match, eh?) Since the machines still work as intended and there are programs around, and Toshiba will provide ongoing support for existing hardware, purchasers will just have to be happy with what they got. (Sure, right, we know how well THAT works!)

I figured Blu-ray would probably win out in the long run since it holds 25GB in the single layer format and HD DVD holds only 15GB. Remember Beta and VHS tapes? Beta had higher quality recording, but because VHS could tape 6-8 hours instead of only 5, it eventually won out…

So what does this mean for movie and game-lovers? Well, for the moment, HD DVD titles are being blown out of inventories to make room for Blu-ray ones, so if you want to keep your HD DVD player fed, now’s the time to get the stuff you’ve been waiting on. (Amazon’s got HD-DVD stuff on sale for 50% or more off right now!) However, if you hadn’t purchased either type of player yet, you can now either get a really great bargain on an HD DVD player that will only have a limited amount of product for it or finally take the plunge and pick up a Blu-ray device. (That is, unless you want to wait and see what takes its place in the next 2-3 years. LOL)

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