I haven't been paying much attention to all this HD vs Blue-ray stuff until I noticed yesterday how inexpensive the HD players are now. Is there any point of getting one, will anyone continue to produce movies for them or will it come to the point that new DVDs will only be in Blue-ray?
Toshiba and Microsoft have announced it will no longer manufacture them, giant retailers like Walmart and BestBuy will no longer stock either the players or discs, and studios will no longer release movies in HD-DVD.
You could still buy the Toshiba A3, which does a fantastic job of SD up-conversion, but why bother?
Just wait awhile, the prices on Blu-ray players are already starting to come down a bit.
I'd buy one of the HD-DVD players for the upconversion if it wasn't Toshiba. I use my DVD player heavily and from a lot of past experience, Toshiba products don't hold up very well when used a lot.
Blu Ray Players are actually going UP in price. No surprise. Tosh Xa2 are selling on ebay with entire HD-DVD collections for less than the entry level blu ray player.
HD_DVDs are fine for upconversion of SD-DVDs but other than that, will be relics after HD-DVDs are no longer made. They will play standrad DVDs quite well though and so if cheap may make sense for a new player.
It's time for the Blu-ray player manufacturers to smart competing amongst themselves. It's pretty simple economics, really. Whoever has the best priced player will sell the most. I wonder what the per single unit true manufacturing cost of a player actually is?
Blu Ray is moving forward with the Blu Ray 2.0 spec, or Blu Ray Live. This necessitates the inclusion of web enabling ( ethernet), PIP, as well as persistent memory capability.
This will increase the cost of their players most likely.