libellule said:

now they have to fight the DVD king itself

People keep going on and on about one format being better and bla bla but I totally disagree. If from the outset there had been just Blu Ray then uptake till now would have been even less. Stand alone players would have cost over $500. Much less people would have bought stand alone players than they would have now.

Lets see, the cassette tape, compact disc, and DVD didn't suffer a format war, and prices of players dropped fast, and uptake was phenomenal for each... because the formats had compelling advantages.

cassettes were compact, portable and recordable. CDs were compact portable didn't deteriote like tapes, produced better sound, and had features like direct track selection (no "rewinding or fast forwarding")

DVDs, brought all the advantages of CDs to movies, and the picture quality jump was substantial.

What does blu-ray / hddvd bring? Aside from a format war and little boost to PQ?

People were far more willing to gamble on the VCR format war because

a) there was no legacy technology meeting their needs. If you wanted to get in on the new phenomena of recording from TV and/or renting movies, you had to buy in. This was a huge feature. Whats the feature of hidef? moderately better picture quality. its no comparison.

b) everyone benefitted from the purchase. if you owned a TV, a VCR was a luxury that improved your enjoyment of it, and practically EVERYONE owned a TV. The market for a VCR was everyone. The market for a hidef player... much much smaller. most households don't own a hidef TV yet. So what do they need a hidef player for?

Sitting out the blueray/hddvd format war is easy by comparison. A decent DVD player with a good upscaler is under $100, and the only thing we gain by buying in is moderately better PQ... that most TVs in most homes still can't actually display.

So we can easily afford to wait on this one. For half of us there is no point until we get new TVs, and for the other half the "sacrifice" is pretty minor... so only the early adopters and enthusiasts are jumping on board. The rest of us will wait unti the format war is settled or hybrid players become standard, and prices come down to that of DVDs.