| twesterm said: 1) Prices might not fall as fast as they are now, but they would fall (especially in time for Christmas). 2) You are just flat out wrong there. If more people had HD TV's that might be true, but the HD saturation isn't anywhere near high enough to start phasing out DVD's yet. Also, here's the largest reason it absolutely sucks and even if your two reasons weren't crap this one would still outweigh: unless you buy into both formats you're always going to be missing out on movies. As long as there's a split in the studios everyone who buys into an HD format and doesn't have both will be screwed. |
I still watch TV shows in standard def if they're good shows. Given, the *vast* majority of shows and sports that I watch are HD (I have ~70 HD channels right now), but I'll go back to standard def to watch something if I need to. And those instances aren't even wide screen!
DVD vs HD-DVD or BD is much less significant. DVD with a good upscaling DVD player or a TV with a good upscaling chip looks very good. The high def formats on my 1080p 50" set look better primarily in color. The sharpness of the high def formats is more often limited by the camera equipment, lenses, etc than it is the resolution and quality of encoding. Many movies literally soften lenses on purpose, and this is more obvious with HD formats than with DVD. But it means the gap between visual quality is significantly less.
The biggest advantage of the HD formats right now is the surround sound. It's clearer, is more spacious, and is just generally better.
So while I'm happy to get HD-DVDs when I can, I'm also perfectly fine with getting standard def DVDs, especially for things like comedies. I may have paid $98 not only for the ability to watch HD-DVDs, but also to get a damn good standard def DVD player. I don't feel too bad about ~70% of releases being in HD-DVD.
That said, as the high def formats become popular enough to make a significant positive impact on anyone's bottom line (probably ~2 years away yet) we'll see a lot of studios releasing for both formats.
