Saturday, January 12, 2008

Warning for BluRay Buyers

There has been a lot of news lately about Hollywood finally choosing a single format for High Definion (HD) movies, and BluRay has won over HD-DVD. What is NOT being talked about much is the fact that most of the players currently on the market are not set to be compatible with disks to be released even later this year. The Consumerist warns us that unless you are watching your BluRay disks on a Playstation 3, you may be in for a rough wake-up call.

But with the exception of the Playstation 3, current Blu-ray DVD players were built without future-compatibility capabilities, so come this October owners won't be able to take advantage of features like Internet connectivity or enhanced interactivity (whatever that means—details are sketchy). "One key Blu-ray developer told BetaNews that although he builds discs for studios including Fox and Lionsgate, he did not buy a Blu-ray player for personal use."
Buyer beware. Even if the HD wars are over (and I suspect we'll learn from Apple next week that they are not), it is still very easy to get burned in the current market.

2 comments:

"Nick" said...

By the way, one update on the wars... according to Aint It Cool, Paramount decided NOT to excercise it's option to abandon HD-DVD.

So it is still up in the air.

Ward said...

With the Blu Ray, it's not nearly as bad as that bit makes it sound. 1.1 upgrades to PiP and 2 will upgrade to net functionality. Neither of those two things are exactly what the majority of DVD users are interested in and so I suspect that many won't care. Really...Are we that media obsessed that we have to watch one movie in PiP while we watch another? That seems silly. And from what I've read, their discs will still be playable, they just won't be able to use the upgraded features.