Format wars

The war between competing formats for the next generation of DVDs shows no sign of ending any time soon. Pundits have delighted in pointing out that although Blu-Ray, being pushed by Sony, is a better technology on paper, so was Sony’s Betamax – which eventually tanked.

Back then the big mover in video adoption was the porn industry which backed the royalty-free VHS tape alternative.

This time around some are suggesting the battle will be won on the game console front.

In other words whoever has the best games will sell the most consoles and by default, also the most of that company’s flavour of high definition DVD players.

That seems more likely than any sensible suggestion such as which is actually better suited for the future of HD video and TV.

Recently, blank discs have started to appear for Blu-Ray, priced at $42 for a 25GB capacity which has the geeks screaming out loud “too expensive!”

However, what else lets you store close to 25GB and is removable? You’d need five DVD drives to match the capacity – in single-layer – with blanks costing about $1.

Sure you could try double-layer but the blanks cost about $4 and there are lots of reports of incompatibility between various brands.

You could always try tape, but a blank DLT or AIT tape of similar capacity will cost you a lot more than $40 and doesn’t have the access speed. And we can expect the blank Blu-Ray discs to get cheaper – DVD blanks used to be $10 each not all that long ago.

The appeal of the competing HD-DVD camp is being able to read old-style DVDs but surely some whiz-kid in the Blu-Ray camp will figure out how to do that soon enough.

Is there any demand out there from punters, geeks excepted, for these new drives? Or will they only react when they see Lord of the

Rings in HD at the next expo?