It doesn't matter, this is Blu-Ray's high point, brought on by the PS3. It's only downhill from here as stand alone HDDVD player sales begin to gain momentum. As well as PS3 sales decline.

HDDVD will be cheapest, much faster. The 299 and 199 price points will be HDDVD's while PS3's are still $500 this fall as the cheapest Blu Ray player.

Plus isn't the 360 HDDVD player rumored to get a price drop? That will help too. 

WTF

you think stand alone hddvd players will out sell PS3.... 

Sony already said a $300 Br player is possible by the end of the year.

 and the what is rumored is a Br ad don for the 360 

Don't you understand? There won't be movies for these cheap HD-DVD players. All blockbusters of this year would be exclusively on BD. 

Last I checked Blockbuster had commited to having a selection of movies in both formats ...

Studio support may shift if sales of the PS3 do not pick up aswell. I have no insider information but it is likely that Sony gained a lot of studio support for Blu-Ray by showing how quickly the PS2 sold and claiming that there would be 20+ Million PS3 systems in homes by the end of the year; with how sales have dropped off I expect Sony will be lucky to sell 8.

Anyways, to expand upon Sharky's point ...

Sony sold 1 Million PS3 systems in North America which greatly increased the sales of Blu-Ray movies but it is likely the vast majority of these systems were sold to gamers. Stand alone HD-Movie players are being sold primarily to movie collectors at this point in time and the majority of stand alone players sold are HD-DVD machines. A movie collector will likely buy a movie every week or so whereas a gamer will likely buy a game a month and a movie whenever one they want becomes availabler; it is not that uncommon to find movie collectors who own 2,500+ DVDs that they aquired by buying 4 or 5 DVDs per week.

If Sony sells 1.5 Million PS3 systems in North America for the rest of the year and 500,000 stand alone HD-DVD players are sold it is plausable that HD-DVD could take the lead in weekly movie sales.

@ HappySqurriel

There will not be any studio-support shifting... Sony alone has 17 % market share. It's almost twice more than all exclusive support for HD-DVD (Universal + Weinstein) I will repeat once again the biggest titles of this year comes from BR camp - Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, only Harry Potter is multi platform. Situation is very similar to the game market - few hardcore collectors mean not so much against a multitude of casuales. BTW I believe you can find also a lot of collectors among owners of BR-players so this argument is pretty lousy. Hardware sales is interesting for hardware manufacturers. Studios care about sale of movies. You can find a list of bestsellers in this thread.

wrong and wrong. Planet Earth has yet to be released on either format, and yes it will naturally peak quickly and higher than BD simply because there are countless more quality titles that people buy on BD....look at Departed, Babel etc. Films that have been out for more than negative 2 weeks (planet earth isnt even out yet!!!!!) You will see that the trend and logic is clear.....you starve the puppy and theyll eat anything you throw out, lack of titles will drive a decen BD/HD DVD film to peak quickly and higher on HD DVD, but in the end, its not going to matter as BD flexes its muscles.

Again, id liek to direct you to Babel, Superman, Departed. Not a movie that has yet to be released. Its no different than the console competition, look at teh larger picture with movies that have been out long enough to demonstrate a trend and youll see cross releases favor BD.

Another sign HD DVD is gaining some ground back?

http://www.dvdempire.com/Content/Features/hidef_wars.asp?userid=99365557675282

 I realize BluRay is still ahead here, but it seems the drastic differences are starting to end.  Now with the HD player price drop, 70 new titles over the next three months, continued lackluster sales of the PS3... the war is not over yet!  Though I still hold to my beliefs that buy the time regular dvd's are not the format of choice, downloading will be the actual new format. 

wow. 30 dollars for those dvds? no thanks. :P  i'll probably stick with normal dvd for a while. 15 bucks, on sale dvds for 10 bucks. (i have been completely out of the format war so i didnt know some went as high as 30 some dollars)

 Exactly.  I have bought a handful of HDDVD's, but I still buy three times as many dvds and will likely continue for years.

BTW. HD-DVD is also too small. They have problems to pack all extras on one disc. These all "combo edition's" 1 HD-DVD + 1 DVD looks pretty pathetic.