My Opinion: HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray

Anybody who's familiar with the rise of HD video probably knows about the recent format war. That war was between HD-DVD made by Toshiba and Blu-Ray made by Sony. Essentially they both offered the same thing, movies in full 1080p HD. Now a lot of people don't see the point of HD or say they can't tell the difference. I personally like HD a lot. To me it can really bring out the finer details in something and you can see things you might have missed otherwise. Also with older movies they do a real good job of cleaning up the prints and making them look better than they've ever looked.

It was fist announced a few years ago that companies were working on a way to put HD movies onto a single disc since a standard DVD can't hold that much information. Eventually both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were announced. People knew that there was a chance at a format war but I think a lot of people hoped there could be a happy medium.

HD-DVD was the first to come on the scene in March of 2006. Of course the discs and the players were pretty expensive just like DVDs when they first came out. They didn't sell that well because people either didn't want to put down the money or were unfamiliar with the technology.

Then in June of 2006 the first Blu-Ray movies and players started to hit the market. And like HD-DVD they were pretty expensive. The average cost being somewhere around $600 or $700 for a player and $30 for a movie.

But the big thing came when Sony announced that the new PlayStation 3 would have a built-in Blu-Ray player and all of the games would be on Blu-Ray discs. When the system came out sales of Blu-Ray movies shot way up. Since every PS3 owner could now play the movies the format had an instant install base. This made the sales of HD-DVD start to go down. Microsoft tried to counter this by releasing an HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. This was a separate drive that plugged into the console and allowed you to watch HD-DVDs. This unit was about $200 but it didn't sell too well.

Even more nails then started to get driven into the coffin of HD-DVD. Blockbuster announced that they had chosen Blu-Ray as their exclusive HD format. Also Disney had chosen to release its movies on Blu-Ray as had several other major studios. HD-DVD did have support from Warner Brothers and Universal but the movies weren't as popular and weren't be released fast enough to compete. Then Warner Brothers decided to drop the format in favor of Blu-Ray and Universal followed suit. Also Netflix had said that they were going to stop renting HD-DVD movies and were going to go with Blu-Ray as its one format.

In January of 2008 Toshiba said that they were going to stop making players and by June of that year no more new movies would be produced. This meant that the format was pretty much dead and was doomed to go the way of Beta tapes. You can still find the movies for sale online on sites like eBay and they are quite a bit cheaper than Blu-Ray movies.

Now to get to my opinion of this whole situation. I personally think that there should not have been a format war. Throughout the history of technology it's seemed like there can only be one given format. Like the war between VHS and Beta in which VHS won out or CDs versus cassette tapes where CDs won out. But I think in each of these cases both could exist quite happily in the same marketplace.

But probably the reason behind this is consumers don't like to choose. If someone wants whatever is the newest and the best they don't want to stare at two choices and wonder which is better. Especially when the choice involves buy expensive hardware to support it. So by having these wars eventually one format will win and then the consumer is left with only one choice whether they like it or not.

There are some differences when you compare the two discs. First Blu-Ray has a storage capacity of about 25 to 50gb and HD-DVD has a capacity of 15 to 30gb. So Blu-Ray wins out when it comes to overall storage. As far as the picture quality goes both are just about equal. In fact in a lot of reviews I read if one format had better quality it was usually the HD-DVD getting the slight edge.

One thing that HD-DVD had going for it over Blu-Ray is the fact that it is region free. Normally a DVD is coded to a certain region. Meaning that if you buy a DVD in Japan it will only play on a Japanese player or what's called a region free player. But HD-DVD didn't put this in so you could import a movie from anywhere and it would play on any player. Blu-Ray is region coded so if you want a Japanese Blu-Ray you'll need a player that can support it. Also HD-DVD had the ability to have double sided discs. Once side would be the HD-DVD and the other side would be the standard DVD that could be played in any player. Because of the way Blu-Ray is made they haven't yet been able to do this. Some companies were even working on dual format discs that had the HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray but that got scrapped when HD-DVD died.

I really think that Sony could have handled this a whole lot better. It is possible that some of them are still bitter about losing the previous format war to VHS and they wanted to do whatever they could to win this one. So they used their collective corporate might to sway movie studios and companies in their favor to choose Blu-Ray over the competition.

What's probably funniest is if there are two formats out there they will compete with each other. This means coming up with new features and lowering prices. But with only one format the prices can stay high and the new features can be few and far between. So if HD-DVD was still around I'm sure Sony would be doing a lot to swing people to their side of the fence.

So as you can imagine if I was told to choose between the two I wouldn't be able to. HD-DVD has some advantages as does Blu-Ray but all in all the two were pretty equal. It should be interesting to see what the next big format war has in store for all of us.