# HD DVDs DOA?



## Nick (Apr 23, 2002)

*"Two months into the format war...fewer than 5,000 HD players have sold."*

*Video disc war: No clear winner, yet*

8/21/2006 11:27 PM ET USA TODAY

Two months into the format war over the next generation of home video discs,
neither HD DVD nor Blu-ray has made much of an impact on the market.

So far, fewer than 5,000 high-definition players have sold. That's not surprising,
given the marketplace confusion over the dueling formats and the time it usually
takes consumers to adopt new technologies. ...

More @ USA Today

See HD-DVD vs BLU-RAY comparison chart HERE


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## dave1234 (Oct 9, 2005)

Nick said:


> *"Two months into the format war...fewer than 5,000 HD players have sold."*
> 
> *Video disc war: No clear winner, yet*
> 
> ...


Regardless of which format prevails, I'll have no interest until the price is equal to or less than current DVD's. I can see little advantage as current DVD's look stunning on my 61" HDTV. The marginal increase in picture quality is not worth it for me.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

The player has to be a lot cheaper... the movies need to be cheaper and more of them... they need to stop this nonsense of possibly downgrading to 480p unless you connect with HDMI because most of the early HDTV adopters who might purchase HD DVD don't have HDMI connections on their TVs... and of course one format needs to win OR another format needs to win.

There is just not a compelling reason to jump into the HD DVD ring right now as an average customer.


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## bidger (Nov 19, 2005)

Were the sales of SD DVD players two months after their release anything to go nuts over? I'd bet not.


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## JM Anthony (Nov 16, 2003)

This is one technology I'll sit out for a while. A month or two back, I visited our local Sony store and experienced one of their ultra high tech HD rooms. They had a split screen demo of HD DVR vs. regular and you could see finer detail and crisper color. They also had 8.2 audio up and running. When you start running up the tab of what all of this would cost so you could get every once of benefit, it becomes cost prohibitive.

John


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

bidger said:


> Were the sales of SD DVD players two months after their release anything to go nuts over? I'd bet not.


True... but there weren't two competing formats of DVDs for SD... they were competing with VHS which had been around for a while and lots of people had VCRs already... plus DVD players could be connected to pretty much any TV with reasonably equal performance.

With HD, there are two different non-compatible formats and the whole no-upconvert except with HDMI and potential future downconvert too... on top of the high price and low number of movies... plus HD DVD is not as big a jump from DVD to most people's minds as DVD was from VHS... so it is going to be a little bit harder of a sell at first.


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## bidger (Nov 19, 2005)

HDMe said:


> True... but there weren't two competing formats of DVDs for SD...


Well, there was Divx, but it's hard to say that ever mounted much of a threat. Poorly conceived and executed, it died a richly deserved early death.

I'd agree that the jump from SD DVD to hi res DVD probably isn't as pronounced as VHS to DVD. Competing formats doesn't help and neither does upconverting DVD players.

Yeah, it'll be a tough sell, but I think it's too early to say complete failure. At least wait to see if the Holiday Season shows an upswing or at least one format pulling away.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

I agree... too early to declare total failure as this should be a slow adoption process... but in the end at least one camp (HD DVD or Blu Ray) will absolutely be a big flop and waste of money for one company and some consumers as well.

Don't know how this will compare in the end to the BetaMax vs VHS situation... but inevitably someone will be left out in the cold here when the dust settles... which is one of the many reasons I am sitting across the street from the fence waiting!


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## bidger (Nov 19, 2005)

Oh, I'm a fence sitter as well, along with most of the general population. I'm one those unfortunate, well...from a lack of content lately, souls who bought a Pioneer universal DVD-Audio/SACD player in 2003. I don't regret the music I bought, but neither proved to be a successor to CD. If you want new titles, you better be a Classical Music or Jazz fan, and my tastes are more Rock/Pop.

That experience made me a little gunshy. I went CD in early 1988, DVD in early 2000, and DVR in late 2000. Competing formats is a red flag for anyone burnt in previous skirmishes and, for the time being, I'll observe this one from the sidelines.


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## Chris Blount (Jun 22, 2001)

I'm an early adopter. I had my first DVD player in April of 97 and had my HD-DVD player the first weekend it was out. I have no interest in Blu-Ray.

I have a Optoma DLP projector with a 106" screen. There is a BIG difference between SD DVD and HD-DVD. I will say that regular upconverted DVD's do look quite good through the HD-DVD player but when you pop in an actual HD-DVD, the difference is very noticeable.

I agree though that for the regular consumer, sitting on the fence is a good idea but if you have a home theater with a large screen, you won't regret the upgrade. Besides, if the HD-DVD format does die, you are left with one of the best upconverting players on the market.



dave1234 said:


> I can see little advantage as current DVD's look stunning on my 61" HDTV. The marginal increase in picture quality is not worth it for me.


Trust me, you will see the difference on your 61" screen.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

YAWN!

The reason why sales aren't picking up is because most are sitting on the side lines to see which format comes out the best. To make matters worse, there seems to be one HD player for each format. Add in the fact that there aren't any collection-worthy movies or gee-wiz movies on the HD format yet. 

Of course, the DVD side isn't all that terribly exciting this year either.


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## bidger (Nov 19, 2005)

Chris Blount said:


> I have no interest in Blu-Ray.


With what little I do know about the competing formats at this time, I'd have to agree with you there.

MPEG-2?! That's so Nineties!


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## Chris Blount (Jun 22, 2001)

bidger said:


> MPEG-2?! That's so Nineties!


:lol: Agree. That is one of the reasons Blu-Ray has an uphill battle not to mention the price of the players.

Also, Toshiba is about to release new firmware (version 2.0) that enables Dolby TruHD 5.1.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

Chris Blount said:


> I'm an early adopter. I had my first DVD player in April of 97 and had my HD-DVD player the first weekend it was out. I have no interest in Blu-Ray.
> 
> I have a Optoma DLP projector with a 106" screen. There is a BIG difference between SD DVD and HD-DVD. I will say that regular upconverted DVD's do look quite good through the HD-DVD player but when you pop in an actual HD-DVD, the difference is very noticeable.
> 
> I agree though that for the regular consumer, sitting on the fence is a good idea but if you have a home theater with a large screen, you won't regret the upgrade. Besides, if the HD-DVD format does die, you are left with one of the best upconverting players on the market.


My problem is that I was an early adopter of HDTV... so I do not have HDMI, which means I cannot even taken advantage of the upconvert since the upconverting is limited to HDMI connections, even though there is no technical reason to do so... So even if I wanted to pay the going price and wanted to pick a side and support... I can't make full use of the technology due to its designed restrictions for the early adopters like me.


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## NurseDave (Aug 20, 2006)

If the PS3 will be able to play bluray movies without added hardware, that might give them a boost.


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## gundyrat (Sep 3, 2006)

Pioneer has announce a duel format player that will play both Blu Ray and HD-DVD
If more companies did this there would be no war.

There was a war at one time a little known war between Dolby Digital AC-3 and DTS

Dolby won beating DTS to the market with a working product subsequently Dolby Digital was adopted as the Default Audio format for the then soon to be released High Definition, 
Who knew it would take 10 plus years to actually get High Derfinition in to consumers homes.

the point here is we have 2 viable Audio formats availible even today niether a clear winner both with pro's and cons.

I was an early adopter into AC-3 via a Pioneer VSX-D3S( Zoran AC-3) and Pioneer Elite CLD-79 LD player it was an expensive transition.

I'm not be so eager to jump on the HD DVD bandwagon till the bugs are worked out.
imo


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## Nick (Apr 23, 2002)

gundyrat said:


> ...I'm not be so eager to jump on the HD DVD bandwagon till the bugs are worked out. imo


 What bugs?


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## bidger (Nov 19, 2005)

gundyrat said:


> Pioneer has announce a duel format player that will play both Blu Ray and HD-DVD
> If more companies did this there would be no war.


Pioneer, and several other CE cos., did the same thing with SACD and DVD-Audio. Didn't make much difference in their outcome.


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