Opinion: Total recall

Well, that’s very nice for anyone who bought a player from Amazon, but what about the rest of us? Where’s the compo for all the other consumers bitten by this utterly pointless marketing war?

Way back when the format war was being fought between Beta and VHS video tapes, hostilities lasted many years and consumers got many years enjoyment from their purchase, despite which format they chose. But the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war seems to have lasted only about ten minutes, so there’s scant content available to HD-DVD player owners and no chance of any more in the future. Why isn’t Toshiba offering to replace every HD-DVD player with a Blu-ray player?

This is the only honourable course of action, and surely Toshiba could re-tool its assembly lines to produce Blu-ray players – therefore reducing its cost in providing replacements to hapless consumers. Presumably, Toshiba still wants to put high-capacity optical storage into its notebook offerings, so why not get with the program and swap the obsolete HD-DVD gubbins for something useful? And, the Blu-ray version will store 50GB which makes it much more attractive anyway as a backup medium.

Hands up all those in favour of a total recall by Toshiba.