Blu-ray Won - Should You Care?
Do you remember the videotape recorder battle between VHS and Betamax 20 years ago? VHS won. Anyone who had bought the Sony Betamax was stuck with the 8-track tape of video.
It has happened again. HD DVD has lost to Blu-ray which will be the standard for high-definition DVD technology.
The last blow was delivered when Toshiba decided to stop making “HD DVD†high-definition video disc players and recorders.
So now, the competition will heat up among the manufacturers of Blu-ray DVD players and recorders (Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Sharp Corp., and Samsung Electronics).
The videotape battle was VHS (Matsushita) versus Betamax (Sony) in the 1980s. Sony still made some Betamax products for about 10 more years, but they had lost the war.
Is one really better? They both deliver crisp, clear high-definition pictures and sound that look better than the standard DVDs you probably have at home or in your school. But they are incompatible with each other, and neither type plays on standard DVD players.
Who are the losers?
On the corporate side, the Hollywood studios that produced HD DVD movies: Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation. Other HD DVD supporters included Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Japanese electronics maker NEC Corp.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game machine can play HD DVD movies if you bought a separate drive for it. About 300,000 people bought those. And if you are one of the 300,000 worldwide who own a PC with an HD DVD drive, it's a relic.
Of course, consumers are the real losers once again. I remember the term "planned obsolescence" from my younger days. This obsolescence wasn't planned. I wish the manufacturers HAD planned, so that we could have avoided this Beta/VHS situation from happening again.
Now, should I buy a plasma or an LCD high def TV set? Roll the dice.
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