p2pnet.net — The HD DVD folks admit to being outsold by Blu-ray by at least five to one with Sony's PlayStation 3 as the edge. But movie sales are still level and, "Film studio 20th Century Fox, which supports Blu-ray, said weekly Blu-ray film sales are actually three times higher than HD DVD".
Mar 16, 2007 View in Crawl 4
greatdrokMar 16, 2007
I was rooting for Blu-Ray but the cost of players has prevented me from jumping in yet. I have an HD capable projection system and a Xbox 360 so the HD-DVD drive made sense as it was much cheaper than the cheapest Blu-Ray player available. The thing that bothers me about Blu-Ray is the region coding. HD-DVD has none and I am able to buy discs from anywhere in the world without any worries that they will play. The Wikipedia page about HD-DVD states that they will never have region coding and to me that is a very big selling point. I don't expect to buy a Blu-Ray player until a region free player exists. Ideally, I would get a region free Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/DVD combi player but who knows how long that will take. For the moment, there are enough films on HD-DVD available here in Europe as well as in the US that I don't regret the purchase. There are some BDs I would like to buy but not many and in Europe BD isn't any more popular than HD-DVD because the PS3 still isn't available. I'm sure things will change when the PS3 comes out and I may buy one and then start buying BDs then but the lack of access to US BD releases is definitely a real problem. I can buy US HD-DVDs for far less than the UK release of the same film and I am sure the price of BDs is the same. It was also true when DVD first appeared, and for LD before that. If I can't play US discs, I'm not at all happy.