HDDVD/Blue Ray COMBO DRIVE!

[Rakeesh]

Personally I am waiting for both formats to fail before I buy anything.

[six_storm]

Just for the record . . . I finally saw BluRay today at BB. They had a Samsung BR Player and 40" 1080p LCD playing trailors and whatnot. Also, they had that setup right next to the Westinghouse 42" 1080p LCD with Toshiba HD-DVD player.

Honestly, there is a pretty noticeable difference. I didn't ask any of the employees if they had set the TV to proper settings but I dunno why they would put something out like that.

Here's my opinion of what I saw. HD-DVD > Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray setup didn't look all that High Def, it really just looked like a regular DVD upconverted to 1080i. Most BB stores should have the BR players now so go and check them out, let me know what you think.

[msxyz]

At the AVS forums, they're having a field day other this.

Apparently the first BR movies are on single layer disc, using MPEG2 compression. Current tools (form Sony) don't support yet VC-1. That Sony doesn't want to use VC-1 is somewhat understandeable, since I will end up paying royalties to Microsoft. But it's jeopardizing the launch. Some people at AVS forums claim (and I've no reason to doubt them) that the HD broadcasts of the "5th element" are superior to the current BR edition

Somewhat more worrying is the fact that first BR discs have less dense tracks and they're not reaching the claimed capacity of 25GB but only ~20GB. This because of problems with the printing process. The same problems are affecting also double layered discs which are likely to be "not a viable solution" for at least the next 6 months.

This article http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/lifestyle/articles/0606/20/news027.html appeared on a japanese site bascially confirms that the first wave of BR disc uses a rather low bitrate MPEG2 stream.

[nekrosoft13]

very nice, sony up to their old tricks again

say one thing before the launch, after launch the truth comes out

comparing blu-ray to betamax is not even fair now, betamax used to be supperior product back in the day. while now blu-ray is complete junk.