Get yer standards here!

Vendors just don’t get standards. They say they do, and we all believe them, then they go and foist another standards war on consumers and who do you think is in the front line? Resellers of course.

Consumers aren’t going to be traipsing back to the Sony or Toshiba factory if they choose the wrong high-definition DVD format. They’ll be coming right back into our stores and they’ll be mad as hell.

This Blu-ray versus HD-DVD war never needed to happen but some IT vendors just can’t keep their egos inside their Armani suits.

Consumers had enough trouble figuring out DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD RAM and wondering why their player would spit out some and happily digest others. Finally, the electronics wizards have overcome the media morons and built the latest flock of DVD players to handle anything that will fit on the tray.

Well that was until yesterday when the first PCs with the new high-definition drives appeared on reseller shelves.

So far you can’t even buy a player to stick under your TV, you can only get one inside a Media Center PC from Altech or a laptop from Toshiba.

But it’s moot anyway as the movie houses aren’t spitting out high-definition disks yet, so there’s nothing to play on your new PC unless you burn it yourself. At least with the Toshiba HD-DVD version you can stick old-fashioned DVDs in the drive. Blu-ray won’t play anything except Blu-ray.

Yet all the gurus have got behind Blu-ray as the best choice for the future of high definition viewing. They really think everyone is going to have two players under the TV, a new Blu-ray alongside the old DVD player?

Or do they really think everyone is going to re-purchase their entire DVD collection in high definition Blu-ray format? Rabid would really like to see that, but we’ll just buy an extra lotto ticket instead.

Have these vendors forgotten that Betamax had a better picture than VHS? Did it matter to the consumer? Not a jot. And neither will Blu-ray’s better picture promise.

With no backward compatibility with existing DVDs this one is a dead duck. Quack quack thunk.