It would take a release of Citizen Kane on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray to get me to upgrade.

Heh, I'd still wait for the "price drop" on the boxing day weekend. Muh huh huh...

The big question here is who can really make the new technologies sing? And I mean, really sing? And which smaller companies can take advantages of the technologies?

Okay that was 3 questions.

Chris,

When I heard Sky Captain would be released on HD-DVD, I said, "I'm gonna wait, because I'm sick of buying a DVD and then a better version comes out later." Then I realized I'd have to buy an HD-DVD player, and if history is any indication (the first VCR, the first CD player, the first DVD player), the prices will probably be a minimum of $300 to $400...

heath

ps-I'm gonna buy Sky Captain shortly...SD...

And the first DVD discs looked AWEFULL. It is very reasonable to
think the first HD-DVD or blu-ray disc will look worse than discs
2 years later (not to say they won't look great, but they need to
get that technology to the best it can do as well).

Rob,

I still have one of the first DVDs ever, though I bought it 2.5 years after it came out: Twister, and compared to the newer version (circa 2000), it is not nearly as nice, but still pretty decent. And FYI, in early 1998, Siskel and Ebert compared the quality of a DVD and Laserdisc, and the DVD had better resolution. They talked about how it would probably take over, but they didn't need to get rid of their laserdiscs. Then again, most early DVDs were nothing more than re-packaged LDs.

What about those DVDs that were "disposable," that Circuit City got behind? Much lower quality than regular DVDs! UGH!

heath

Wasn't the disposable format called "divx" (no, not *that* codec)?
Or was that something else? It bombed massively, ofcourse.

That's exactly what I was talking about Heath. The resolution is
there for HD-DVD/blu-ray. The question is how good are the encoders
for the various formats on those discs (and which will be used
most since they have windows media on there, but also mpeg4
I believe and some other formats?) and will they take the time
to do it righ or rush it out (probably). We'll see what happens....