Yes sir, GooseGaw you seem like a man who knows his stuff, fill me in.

GooseGaws said:
However, the cost of manufacturing is one of the reasons Paramount cited as cause for their HD-DVD exclusivity.

kber81 said:
Yeah. How about $150 million...

==> +1 for kber81

 You are true G - not conspirator, but this account just isn't your main one. 

@Onimusha12:

Well, HVD in its current preliminary form won't be aimed at a consumer market for a very long time. The costs of the drives and discs involved will be comparatively astronomical.

I better start trolling to live up to the reputation then, I'd hate to be accused of being Gballzack without earning the title first. :)

Sony does not own all of the BD replication centers... There are other companys that also have them. The facilities are expensive however since they must be built from scratch. This however doesn't really matter in the long run considering a studio doesn't have to own a replication center to have their movies pressed. Also you may be refering the Sony being the only ones capable of replicating BD-50 DL disks. That may or may not be true now but it was for the longest time. Also BD-R's are different then a pressed disk. Movie studios don't burn movies.

Also it is no more expensive for movie companys to have BD's pressed than it is to have HD-DVD's pressed. This was a factor for maybe the first 5 months. Blu-rays momentum has allowed for costs to drop very quickly.

51GB HD-DVD's will be playable on all HD-DVD players with a firmware update according to Toshiba. Apparently the new 100GB BD's will also be playable on almost all Blu-ray players via firmware upgrade also although I find this tough to believe. HD-DVD profile was already setup for mandatory support of the 51GB HD-DVD's and was only to require a firmware upgrade. But Blu-ray was not. However they have supposedly found a way to allow the laser to see more layers but who knows.

HD VMD will go nowhere. Without studio support it won't matter. Not even mentioning the fact that their main pro feature is a cost point under $200 I believe it was. By the time it has been released HD-DVD for sure and blu-ray most likely will also have players under this cost point, studio support, and market penetration.

Red Ray = DVD. DVD players use a 650nm diode laser to read data off of the disc. 650nm falls under the "red" section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Blu Ray uses a laser diode somewhere in the 400nm range. Shorter wavelength = larger information density, so you wouldn't really want to go back in the direction of red. If it were decided to continue with optical technology in the same direction by further decreasing the wavelength of the laser used to read a disc, you would get UV Ray.

a cool site to checkout formatwarcentral.com, it's a good unbiased site if you are keeping track of this, BTW.

as for 51gb HDDVD discs, what infos on them that i can find states they're not playable or they're still unsure:

afterdawn.com/news/archive/11138.cfm

betanews.com/article/toshiba_unsure_whether_51_gb_hd_dvd_works_in_existing_players/1169052893

actually, i may stand corrected, but this hasn't been confirmed:

forevergeek.com/movies/hd-dvd_51_gb_disk_approved_for_production.php

Ahhh.  Never heard of it referred to as that before.  I thought he was cracking wise about consumer confusion over the various formats.  Apologies!