First off; Blu-Ray is a Sony product and it makes sense for Samsung to talk a little trash on competition, as in all other markets. And; there is nothing right now that goes beyond Blu-Ray as far as audio and visual quality goes, which kinda makes it look like there's going to be quite some time before something better, quality-wise, shows up. Downloads? It takes a helluva lot of space to store HD content, let alone anything that would be above, not to mention the fact that no HDTV ever made could process the image. Anything better than an HDTV is quite a few years off yet, and most likely the next generation of Tv sets will be made off of Sony's pioneer OLED technology, if anything, which isn't exactly good news for Samsung when you think about it.

Nothing is around the corner, HD signals are massively expensive to broadcast and as a consequence; buy. New TV sets supporting above full HD (1080p) will be many, many years ahead and will hardly be available to commoners in the first turn at any rate. Talk of new formats? I've heard of no such thing, I have heard of advanced imaging panels that can in theory outperform HD resolution but such panels are barely above the experimental stage and as of yet there is not definitive new format "around the corner" that will take over. We're back to downloads and/or streaming, which again will rely heavily upon better compression, super fast internet connections and not to mention screens and equipment built to handle it. You can't download a 25 GB or 50 GB (or 100 for that matter) movie into your TV, nor is it very practical storing such massive files on todays harddrives or flash technology, if one movie takes up maybe 1/5 of your harddrive it starts to lose all meaning downloading it in the first place rather than rent/buy on optical format, not to mention how much space would be required to store something even more storage demanding than HD files.

Of course technology moves forward, but it has to move in synch, there's no point in developing a new format now, no one would afford, want or be able to use it for years. Of course something better will be out, but if you truly believe that HD will be obsolete within 2-3 years (which will be around the 5 year anniversary of the Blu-Ray format) then I have to say that you are the naive one.

HD signals will not replace SD as standard for quite a few years yet, HDTV penetration rate ww is still quite low and even most LCD PC monitors don't support resolutions higher than 1080p (mine is 1600x1200 for instance). HD will move slowly into media as standard, much like digitalized signals did/are, most radio and TV signals ww are still analogue, which speaks volumes of the slow speed in which these things happen. Its not just "BANG" and the whole world upgrade, it doesn't work that way. As a TV format, HD will live a long and prosperous life, while downloads will make up the majority of games and music and perhaps even reading material in the quite near future (don't give me the "but you can hook up your PC to the TV, silly" argument either, that kind of defeats the purpose of the TV and it still won't output better quality visuals than it was initially built for).

Edit; Millenium: you actually think technology will revert? That is ludicrous. And don't tell me there was no price difference in discs and players when DVD started taking over, DVD discs are still horribly expensive considering their age and both players and discs were atrociously priced when they came out so the leaps in consumer costs were equal to if not greater than the consumer cost of making the HD era come true (except TV's of course). I bet you also believe that they will stop sending digitalized TV signals too then? And go back to cassette's or LP's? It makes just as much sense.