Playstation 3: An Under Rated System

[Dolla Dolla]

darendt, you'll have to provide a source for that 10 million BD players sold, cause that's a load of bullocks. The majority of BD players on the market are PS3's, and the PS3 has sold about 3.5 million worldwide. The stand-alone player sales for BD are worse than stand-alone HD-DVD players.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070418-dedicated-hd-dvd-players-outsell-blu-ray-counterparts.html
"To mark its first birthday, the HD DVD Promotional Group has announced that sales of dedicated HD DVD players have topped 100,000 in the US. That figure does not include PC HD DVD drives or the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360, giving HD DVD a lead over Blu-ray in the standalone player department (only 25,000 dedicated Blu-ray players had been sold as of January). Of course, if you factor in the over 1.05 million PlayStation 3s with built-in Blu-ray support sold in the US through February, HD DVD's lead disappears."

And, here is a recent article on the disc sales for each:
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN2220834920070423
"Since the high-def format's inception -- HD DVD launched in April 2006, while Blu-ray got rolling two months later -- more than 2.14 million discs have been purchased by consumers: 1.2 million Blu-ray Discs and about 937,500 HD DVDs."

Notice how miniscule that lead is in disc sales. Some Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles only sell 200 copies. Gballzack is right, their market penetration is atrocious.

Anyway, back on topic, the PS3 isn't underrated. It just hasn't matured yet. With it's consumer unfriendly price and lack of any killer apps, there's little reason to pick one up today, unless you are a Blu-ray enthusiast.

And JDWolf, you are right, there is no difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray except the amount of space on both for the reasons you cited. They both support the same codecs. The only other difference is Blu-ray has an extra layer of DRM protection than HD-DVD, BD+.