Blu Ray vs HD-DVD - A Winner is Announced!

So, this is actually a few days old new, but I wanted to touch on it anyways. For a few years now, Sony and Toshiba have been fighting the Next-Gen video format war. Sony offers Blu-Ray, while Toshiba makes HD-DVD.

Videos in these formats are in high-definition. This means they have a higher picture resolution and therefore, a clearer picture with more detail. Both formats are pretty much the same. They offer the same 1080p resolution. Blu-Ray has more storage space per disc, while HD-DVD offers more interactive content.

Last week, I read that Blockbuster, Target, Walmart, and Netflix all chose to carry ONLY Blu-Ray, which I thought was a major turning point in the war. Then I heard that a major studio that backed HD-DVD was switching to Blu-Ray (I believe it was Paramount, but I'm not positive). This had to be a bad sign.

The next day, I heard rumors that HD-DVD insiders said that Toshiba was planning to drop their High-Def format manufacturing. Soon after, it was confirms on major websites that Toshiba has officially stopped (or plans to stop) production on all HD-DVD software and hardware. Blu-Ray is your next video format of the future.

What does this mean? Well, many consumers who wanted to jump into high-def movies have shied away due to fear that they would buy the inferior product and be stuck with a format no longer supported. Now that Sony has won, this gives consumers all the confidence they need to take the plunge and buy a Blu-Ray player.

This will probably result in a decent rise in Playstation 3's sold. Not only are they the cheapest Blu-Ray players on the market, they are probably the best all around machines. While most Blu-Ray players will only offer a video player that displays Blu-Ray and upscales DVD movies, the PS3 can display Blu-Ray movies, upscale DVDs, play games from PS3/PS2/PS1, has a hard drive to allow you to store and view pictures and videos, comes with an internet browser, and many other features as well.

DVD's will continue to be popular for many years and it probably will be 10 years or so until Blu-Ray is the standard video format. However, those who have recently bought that big high-def 1080p TV will only truly get the full experience of the TV through Blu-Ray and not DVD.