Casualty of the format war
The good news: You can now get your hands on a Toshiba HD DVD player for as little as $120 smackaroos at places including hhgregg, which has a store in Greensboro. That's because that format is going the way of Betamax and Toshiba is slashing prices to keep from sinking faster.
But it may be too, little, too late: A few more big-name companies recently announced they're backing Sony's competing Blu-ray format.
The bad news? There's a casualty regarding the outcome of this format war, and it's your wallet.
"Price is still a barrier for many consumers, experts say, and many are reluctant to spend $400 and $500 on a high-definition player when there are $50 DVD units available that simulate a high-definition quality," Newsday writes.
Regardless, consider the trends in technology in recent years before buying a Blu-ray player, let alone a HD DVD player.
I predict perhaps within five years the whole high definition DVD war will become irrelevant as more products are built with internal hard drives. Right now, you can download high definition movies using digital video recorders or other devices. Or if you have an Xbox 360 and subscribe to its online membership service, you can download high definition movies right onto the video game system's hard drive.
And raise your hand the last time you actually bought a CD? Nobody these days buys music on discs.
Or camcorders. You can buy camcorders nowadays that are disc-free because they come with built-in hard drives.
Comments (3)
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Yes, but one red ring of death will wipe those movies and anything else you've bought in the Xbox marketplace, and they don't replace that stuff if you have to get a new one.
I think a certain segment of people, me among them, like having the hard copy of a movie, case and liners and all. Of course, I've also got an HD-DVD player (spent $150 on it) and a PS3 with Blu-Ray, so I might be biased.
And we specifically bought a HD camcorder last year with mini-DV tapes, not a hard drive -- there are just too many risks and limitations with a hard drive for me to trust my memories to them. We can burn the movies to DVD and upload to them to the computer, and we don't have to worry about the hard drive corrupting or running out of space at a wedding or 50th anniversary party.
Posted on February 14, 2008 12:29 PM
Good points, Mel.
We always back up our downloaded photos, music, home videos and other software onto DVD storage discs and storage flash drives too, for added measure because computer hard drives as you point out can crash and burn. We've had that happen.
Regarding the Xbox 360 ring of death issue, I just got of the phone with a Microsoft customer service rep. to double-check. The ring of death issue will not delete anything from your hard drive because it's not a hard drive issue. Hardware issue? Yes. Two different issues. In fact, you don't return the hard drive for repair. Just the rest of it. So nothing would get deleted, including downloaded content.
Having said that, yes, you're putting some faith into the reliability of the Xbox 360's hard drive. What if it goes on the fritz after your warranty expires? So without the feature of being able to back up the downloaded content onto a disc, which is not the case with the 360, you are taking a risk. Slight, perhaps (I've owned a 360 since Dec. 2006 with zero hard ware or hard drive problems), but a risk nonetheless.
By the way, as of now, you don't permanently save movies onto your Xbox 360 hard drive. You rent them, a point I should have made in original post. Maybe one day, but the 360s would need a ton more storage space to offer that service.
But going to your larger point, I agree that you absolutely must save, save and save all that stuff onto backup discs, regardless of whether you go the hard drive route to watch movies versus buying a player.
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Posted on February 14, 2008 5:55 PM