It's about time they stopped wasting shareholders' money. They never really stood a chance this time around. It's clear now that they should have jointly produced the next generation disc with Sony when the proposal was put forward a few year ago. This time they got burnt. The early adopters that wouldn't listen now have to wake up to find that they have a mini museum in their living rooms.

Once again think before you act. All the titles that you bought in the discarded format will be made available in BD soon enough. The price drops will probably slow as you predicted, but it will continue to drop once HDTV becomes fully established everywhere. The number of HD-DVD players and HD-DVD movie titles on the planet is now fixed forever. Your collection of HD-DVD titles are only useful as long as your machine continues to function. All optical devices fail eventually, more so when they are first generation devices. At that point you will be left with a large collection of shiny plastic discs since you don't have the option of getting a replacement device. It's better to just put that money aside and wait for the BD prices to fall.

You have to remember that Laser disc technology is based on infrared laser technology (like CDs). Those operate at a lower level of precision. The more you increase the level of precision required to operate a machine the more likely you are to suffer from wear and tear, since it will take less wear and tear to throw off a higher precision machine. I'm sure you don't use your laser disc player very regularly as that would have pushed your device past it's operating life-span a long time ago. Add to the mix the fact that there was competition between the rival formats - this always leads to cutting corners at some level, most often at the components level. This means that first generation devices will be guaranteed to have manufacturing and mechanical defects that were not predicted or envisioned.These defect will likely affect the life of the product in the long term, no matter how well the machine appears to run now. Something as simple as a single gear wearing down or flash memory failure can render your device unusable. Operating temperatures can irreversibly alter the chemical nature of internal components.The cooling fan is guaranteed to fail. These are just a few considerations, and this is true for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray devices. It did take time for many older movies to make it to DVD, but that was because demand for them wasn't as great as contemporary films of the day and it required that costly electronic editing be carried out to digitize them and to bring these older films to the quality worthy of a DVD. This doesn't actually apply to movies already created in HD-DVD format. The raw digital data used to create the compressed data stored on the HD-DVD is already there lying around,and in most cases won't even need to be re-encoded since both formats support the same compression techniques (MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VC-1 etc). Transfering old film to HD format may present a problem since the raw data for encoding to high def must at least be in 1080p and additional editing will again be required to 'clean up' defects. It's up to you to determine how you will spend your money, but just know that you do so with some degree of risk-taking. Buying more movies for your HD-DVD device means that you will likely use it more often and consequently push it ever faster towards the end of it's operating lifespan.

Yes, what I said is also true of current BD drives. The smart thing would be to wait until cheaper second generation BD drives make an appearance as you have just said. Buying a combo drive changes your equation immensely. The build standards of the combo drives tend to be higher than that used in the consumer electronics version of these devices. In addition, having the drive in your computer instead of a set-box allows you to move the drive to another computer if parts external to it fail to operate. You have more control over the operating environment as you can change the cooling fans, CPU, memory etc if anything fails. Remember that these new devices are really just computers with CPUs and memory just like modern PCs, and if anything happens, for instance, to the CPU fan in these HD-DVD or BD devices, it's toast. You now have the option of extending the life of your devices so buying HD-DVDs in your case can make economic sense. I own a bluray burner for data storage, but that's as much as i'm going to spend until the price is favorable and i'm confident that i can rely on what's coming off the production lines.

I agree with your assesment. And since I graduate school in December, I will not really need my dual format drive for school anymore and will be able to move that device out to my livingroom for viewing purposes. Hopefuly by then BD media will have dropped down in price and released some of the older, but more popular titles like Back to the Future and Star Wars. I look forward to that day.

Kitrax. I too don't like the fact that Sony has won the format war. And without competition, they'll have more freedom to do what ever they want. Let's hope that someone does keep a close eye on them and keep them from taking advantage of the consumers. But seeing how things are going, I doubt anyone really cares as long as they too are making money out of this. Competition was the key for control in price and technology developement. But now... What's going to happen?

Let's hope that the next step has everything to do with truely having technology move forward and not about money and power. Competitors need to take the best features of each other's tech and implemented unto a better and more affordable product. When companies share the development cost it often leads to more affordable products that can be sold at a massive scale and increase revenue.

Let's hope Sony, Toshiba, and other corporations put their pride aside and work together in the future.

Well, I took my own advise. The only way I would pay that much for a Blu-Ray disc player was if it was a PS3. Got it, love it, happy with it. DR Discs look great on it.

That is all.