Gordon Laing

Have you bought into Blu-ray or HD DVD yet? Maybe you’re waiting to see how it pans out.

Perhaps you’re not bothered. Consumer electronics trade shows often mark significant points in format wars, so I hoped we’d see some defining action at this year’s giant IFA event in Berlin. Sadly that wasn’t the case.

There were the usual briefings from each camp highlighting the figures that made their format look the strongest, but little news came out of the show to convince me we’re any closer to a resolution.

One thing has become clear though: in terms of hardware, HD DVD is significantly cheaper. Dedicated players are available from about £200 and Toshiba recently announced a budget model that will cost $299 (about £150) in the US. In contrast, you’re looking at spending £400 or more on a Playstation 3 or a standalone Blu-ray player.

If you want the cheapest point of entry, you could equip your PC with a suitable drive. Here Blu-ray always had a disadvantage in pricing because, while the drives could write Blu-ray media, this made them expensive.

Recognising that home cinema enthusiasts are more interested in watching movies than backing up gigabytes of data, Pioneer earlier this year launched the BDC-202 drive, which combines Blu-ray playback capabilities with CD and DVD writing. That’s a nice solution for media PCs at about £150, but trumping it is Microsoft’s HD-DVD drive, which, while designed for the Xbox 360, works fine on PCs. It offers only playback of high-definition discs, but can be picked up for £90.

The cost of hardware is a significant factor, but arguably more crucial still is the availability and variety of software, and in this respect at least one recent announcement raised eyebrows. In late August Hollywood studios Paramount and Dreamworks announced they would exclusively support HD DVD.

Whatever the reason for the switch, one thing’s for certain: if you’re after Shrek, Indiana Jones or Star Trek in high-definition, you’ll need an HD DVD player.

The mention of specific titles inevitably results in groaning but there will always be one that gets you going, and when this becomes available in a better version than ever before, it’s hard for any fan to resist. For me Star Wars can easily sell me into a new format. Increasingly definitive versions saw me buy into Laserdisc and I’d jump at the chance to own the trilogy on high-definition disc.

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