Whice player should I choose?, Blueray or HD and why?

Question

Whice player should I choose?, Blueray or HD and why?

Answer 1

You have no choice but to go Blu-Ray, Toshiba, the main backer of HD-DVD bowed out of the HD disc race, and no one is manufacturing HD-DVD anymore.  You can read more about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd-dvd

Answer 2

hd died already.only choice left is blu.

Answer 3

Possibly neither. As others have said, HD DVD is no more so your choice is really up-converted DVD or Blu-ray.

Even if Blu-ray is your choice, unless you are prepared to pay the current premium price for both the player ($300+) and movies (typically $10 more than DVDs of the same movie) you may be wise to wait.  Prices will come down, and by then there will be more choice of players (including Profile 2.0 players with HD audio decoders built in), more choice of movies, and it it may be clearer if Blu-ray will ever be more than a niche high priced alternative to DVD.

Keep in mind that DVD isn't going anywhere soon (and there are 80,000+ DVDs vs less than 600 Blu-ray titles), Blu-ray is less than 1.5% of total DVD sales (or about 7% of new movie sales), many consumers don't find sufficient benefit from Blu-ray to justify switching, and many movies simply don't justify HD treatment (due to poor mastering, poor original film quality, subject matter/genre, or intentional grain or other director inspired artifacts).

At the very least you need a moderate to large HDTV -- preferably 1080p --  and a good surround sound system. Anything less and benefit over upconverted DVD will be limited.

Some will say improved sound is THE reason to switch to Blu-ray, BUT this is only true if you have the acapability to handle the advanced lossless audio formats (something maybe 3% of consumers can do with current equipment).

Few talk about the slow loading of Blu-ray disks, disks that won't play on some players, confusing audio options, the need for frequent firmware updates on players, the heavy overhead of DRM and region coding, the fact that the only recommended player is a game machine (the PS3), etc.

Consider carefully ... many knowledgeable consumers (myself included) are in no hurry to buy into Blu-ray.