Only MikeB would say Blu-Ray has "no more rewinding" as an advantage.

You forgot to list the biggest advantage of DVDs imo.

Repeated watching of the same movie did not damage the medium.

I have countless VHS that I recorded myself which after 10 viewing or so were starting to show some issues...

That, with price is one of the big reasons VHS never took off as a medium to sell movies to the mass market. You could not expect a tape bought one day to still be in the same shape 5 years later...

I only ever bought 2 VHS.

I have a collection of 350 or so DVDs.

And I own about 10 Blu-Ray ( I switched to buying in Blu-Ray last September).

Guys its a sony product, its only logical that the entire gaming community would hate it, despite being miles better than DVD imo.,

HDTV is a major step up from SDTV. On an interlaced SDTV screen it doesn't matter much if it's VHS, DVD or Blu-Ray in terms of picture quality. Like I said Blu-Ray makes sense for HDTV owners, it provides a huge gain in quality.

sometimes it doesn't matter what the benefits are over the last format.

when someone who isn't as informed goes to an electronics store to buy home theatre stuff they'll really consider getting what's suggested to them.

what employee would down play a BD sale when it will result in a larger commission... unless that employee is a raving MS fanboy.

also, for some consumers having the best quality means something. so even it's just a little bit, they'll buy it. how much better was supervhs compared to vhs?

What's your source for this?  I'd double check it if I were you, because it's horribly wrong.

That's still just picture quality, something that has never sold a format on its own.

VCDs were low quality MPEG 1s usually worse then VHS becasue of poor compression and the resolution was not a step. Also Menus were not prevelent in the majority of the early VCDs and as you say VCDs were inconvinent for the multiple discs.

They became popular in asia because of their low price compared to VHS. Laser Discs were expensive and never went down in price. Laser Discs were also awkward as they had different read types by machine though in the 90's they came together it still meant that you had to be careful that you bought the right discs. Compression hadn't come along far enough and it could only hold just under 2 hours of video per side in the right format. The other format only held 30 minutes of video.

Laserdiscs were more suceptable to stratches and dust and there were issues of getting frames mixed up on the screen at the same time. DVD also bought in USOPs and copy protection 2 things that helped drag in the studios after the battle of VCRs in the 80s

Also laserdiscs did not have menus an in your face feature that spelled control as a feature. Although in realty LDs did have direct control of play and stop and fast forward.

Well true and D-Beta and D-VHS have better quality than blu-ray but they will never take off in the consumer world. In the pro world ti is obviously different.....Though I am a fan of P2 myself.

I attribute it to the failure of Toshiba and fall in global demand for Ipods.

This is what I was talking about but there are a lot of folks here that you have to spoon feed. Witch is something I have little time to do.