I used to favour HD-DVD, mainly because of the price and region free players. But a lot of things have happened during the recent months, and having now bought a Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Player and a pile of 51 movies I'm officially a Blu-ray camp supporter.
Well so for everyone wondering why I finally went Blu.
- Price is no longer an issue, standalone Blu-ray players used to be expensive, but now with the recent batch of Sony and Samsung players the price gap is insignificant.
- Region protection is annoying but not as big issue as I first anticipated. For me most important is that the player is capable of playing US, Korean and Japanese movies, and conveniently all those countries are Region A.
- Disney, even though this is not that significant for me personally. It is going to be a major factor for many people.
- Anime, Blu-ray has more studio support.
- Anchor Bay, I love horror movies
- Jpop Music/Concerts. Sony owns the rights to a lot of the music I listed to. And seriously these really are an improvement in HD, concerts are so dark with lots of movement and lights, they are a real bitrate killer and rarely look good on standard DVD.
A few things for the record,
I live in Europe Region B land, so I imported the movies and the player. I have no problem watching them without subtitles. I can see that things are leaning towards Blu-ray also in Europe. This is because Toshiba delayed their players, and the first ones were released at about the same time as the PS3 over here. Even though the PS3 launch was a train wreck, the actual sales are moving along at a pretty good rate. Also I have seen atleast three major Swedish movie sites posting news that Blu-ray won the US rental market, so even though some people here did not see it as big news, those sites did.
PS3 has I believe converted many to Blu-ray, but personally for me I see consoles and movie players as two separate things. The only console I own is actually an Xbox 360
I no longer see Blu-ray loosing as an option, the best Toshiba can do at this point is to hang in there and pray that cheap dualformat players saturate the market. As things are going I can see either Blu-ray winning or dualformat becomes standard.