You can buy them now, and if you like to be at the forefront of new tech, you might even own one already, yes its the two new competing high definition video disc formats. HD DVD and blu-ray are two names being thrown around a lot recently, yet there have been no outright 'you must buy one of these now' statements, this is because there is no clear winner yet. Its an odd situation and many parallels are being drawn with the betamax and vhs war of many decades ago. So what is there that you need to know about there two formats, and what is actually important. Were going to take a quick overview on each with links in more detail to the relevant wiki pages.
blu-ray is sony technology with support from various companies and movie studios including Apple, Mitsubishi and 20th Century Fox. The blu-ray discs can store more info 25 gb as standard, compared to the HD DVD of 15 gb, they both use the same codec to compress the video mpeg 2 and vc1 and they both use blue lasers to read the data on the discs. The differences between the two are the size of space on the discs the lasers read and the depth into the underside of the disc the lasers go. blu-ray has a smaller laser read size and reads closer to the bottom of the disc, this gives blueray more storage as the laser reads smaller information but closer to the surface of the disc also bringing cause for the discs to get damaged easier from scratches and other bumps, knocks and being used as a drinks mat
HD DVD is backed by Microsoft, intel and toshiba, and the current HD DVD dvd players are half the price of blu-ray players, this will more than likely change when the ps3 shortages are overcome as it plays blueray discs at around half the price of current players. HD DVD can also produce double sided discs, one side in standard dvd format and one side in hd dvd format, or single sided discs which contain both dvd and HD DVD images. This means you can buy your HD DVD discs now, still play them on your old dvd player and when you buy a HD DVD player later you dont have to rebuy movies in the new format. Its a nice idea just remains to be seen how widely adopted it is, if it is adopted it will make a massive difference to some purchasers. Blueray does have the ability to do this too but there has been no mention of it actually being done yet.
The current situation is, HD DVD wins on price, blu-ray wins on capacity size, they both have a decent selection of movies out, and there is no clear winner yet, which leaves everyone intending to upgrade with a difficult decision. Personally i want a player that reads both disc formats, win win!
Link to the HD DVD official site
HD DVD Wiki link
Link to the blu-ray offical site
blu-ray Wiki link
Technorati tags blu-ray HD DVD blu ray
