Sing Blue Silver
Posted on 25th February 2008
The battle is over. For some time now there has been a competition, reminiscent of the VHS/Betamax video format war, in the high definition market for video disk encodings, between Blu-ray pioneered by Sony (pun intended) and HD DVD championed by Toshiba. As of last week, "Toshiba drops out of HD DVD war". As a consequence the HD DVD players and recorders, as well as the HD DVD disks themselves are to disappear from our shelves. I have no preference for a particular high definition format, but I am glad that an early decision has been made. Perhaps not early enough for some, but I suspect the vast majority now discovering the improved formats, will be able to buy players and disks with more security that they are going to be able to play them on equipment in the future.
I remember the war back in the 70s and 80s with the VHS and Betamax formats for videos cassette formats, and although the Betamax format was widely regarded as the better format, Philips domineered the market so much, that regular consumers were hardly given the choice between the two. In this current change of heart, it appears that Toshiba have re-evaluated their format, and with the majority film studios electing to use the Blu-ray format, have admitted it was going to be a difficult race to win. They've gracefully conceded, and allowed consumers to win.
I've only recently bought a HD Ready TV, and thankfully it has all the proposed format connection sockets. I hadn't quite got so far as thinking about the player/recorder to go with it, but now I don't have to worry about making the wrong choice ... at least not with the format.
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