Toshiba To Halt HD-DVD Production 494
Multiple users have written to tell us that Toshiba is planning to halt production of devices related to HD-DVD. According to Japanese broadcasting network NHK, Toshiba will lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" as the format war finally draws to a close. Regardless, investors are pleased that Toshiba has made the decision to cut its losses. This comes after a last-ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-mart from throwing their lot in with Blu-ray, although some sources suggest that Wal-mart was already aware of Toshiba's plans to withdraw from fight.
whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Funny)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Funny)
I always think the funniest acronym is PXE UNDI - it sounds like fairy knicker to me.
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Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
90%+ of average consumers don't have any clue whatsoever what "VHS" stands for, and couldn't care less.
For that matter, most consumers couldn't tell you what "HD" stands for either.
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Hot Damn!
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Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Funny)
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The worst thing I've seen as recently as today, is still photo (as opposed to movie) cameras which bear the "Full HD 1080p" logo, even though they CANNOT record video. It's simply stating that it has a digital output which can show still images at 1080 line.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Informative)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Informative)
An even smaller percentage know that it actually stands for "Vertical Helical Scan," a technical acronym which describes the physical tape format and transport.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Informative)
That's because they're right. VHS has been Video Home System [wikipedia.org] for decades, probably since its consumer launch (and certainly at least soon afterward).
The engineers might have called it "vertical helical scan", but it wasn't ever widely marketed that way.
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And those who do, probably think it stands for "Video Home System" -- a backronym created by a bunch of marketing types.
That's because they're right. VHS has been Video Home System [wikipedia.org] for decades, probably since its consumer launch (and certainly at least soon afterward).
The engineers might have called it "vertical helical scan", but it wasn't ever widely marketed that way.
Erm, that means the acronym actually stands for "vertical helical scan" my friend. Making up a new meaning for an acronym doesn't change its original meaning. Hence the term used by the OP "backronym" - an explanation that won't scare the neophytes who purchase the technology.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Insightful)
It also doesn't make the original meaning "more correct", except for people who want to sound smart at parties.
That's not really appropriate here. Since VHS was never known as anything other than Video Home System to the world at large, you can't really claim that it's wrong. At the very least, you could say that both are correct.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like a product trademark to me: you don't complain that the word Panasonic is 'better' than say Toshiba, just because Panasonic literally means pro-sound and Toshiba is a compound noun where To- means Tokyo, and what -shiba is I forgot. But that doesn't still make Panasonic any 'better'.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Funny)
3.5" Floppy Disc - today's format is based on Sony design
Compact Disc - developed by Sony and Philips
DVD - developed by Sony and Philips
Digital Audio Tape - de-facto standard in the music and professional audio industry
Beta - the standard tape format in the video industry for the past 20 years
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
Betacam, Betacam SP, DigiBeta and the newer HD versions are THE standard in the video industry. Even the Betacam SP, now 20 years old at least, is very widly used and still hasn't been fully replaced by the newer digital versions, even in the "Western" video world.
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Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Informative)
This is not insightful, you've just made up facts, so you're forcing me to finally sign up.
I visited Samsung back when DVD technology was still in the labs and their guys were very keen to show it off. They all referred to it as a Digital Versatile Disc. Remember at this point you couldn't buy a DVD in the stores and data DVDs became mainstream a long time after videos.
Also for it to be a backronym then it couldn't have been an acronym beforehand. From dictionary.com:
backronym jargon
(Backward acronym) A word which has been turned into an acronym
or
n. [portmanteau of back + acronym]
A word interpreted as an acronym that was not originally so intended.
[/rant]
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Informative)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Informative)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Insightful)
PCMCIA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure something that can be (and frequently is) pronounced 'Blurry' is a great name for an HD format either...
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Frequently? never heard that before - sounds like product bashing from the HD-DVD fanboys.
Better luck next time (Score:2, Funny)
Now if we can convince England to use the euro and drive on the right side of the road we can at least pretend to be a modern civilization
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Interesting)
The Playstation 3 has outsold all other high-definition disc players on the market put together by a huge margin. This is the only machine that disc manufactures will make sure is fully compatible.
If this situation continues, and the other manufacturers don't drastically improve their performance, then Blu-ray is set to become almost as proprietary to Sony as the UMD.
Blu-ray Disc Association is slightly bigger (Score:5, Informative)
The current 18 board members (as of January 2008) are: [blu-raydisc.com]
Like the PS2 was one of the biggest DVD players in the beginning, the PS3 will be the biggest Blu-ray player... that is untill in 1 1/2 year a $100 Samsung / LG profile 2.0 Blu-ray comes on the market.
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Microsoft shows us daily that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sony, by contrast, is just plain evil.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Interesting)
And even that one isn't feature-complete with regards to the audio codecs that BD supports. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a single BD player out there that supports the full range of options that are in the BD spec.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Interesting)
Concerns about 1.1 players aren't completely unfounded thanks to BD+ and its DRM "enhancements". BDA has reserved every right to revise the Blu-Ray standard in a way that would render 1.0 (and possibly 1.1) players unable to play even the main feature. They haven't done it yet... but they could, and consumers (in the US, at least) would have no recourse whatsoever. It says so right on the first or second page of every new player's manual.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Interesting)
Client: The DVD your sent me is worthless! It doesn't work! Send me another one!
Me: Sir, what brand player do you have?
C: It's a Marantz, their top of the line! Your product is crap! I want a new DVD!
Me: Sir, the Marantz players are not compatible with DVD-R/RW or DVD+R/RW media, and they do not properly implement the full DVD specification. It's not our disc, it's your player.
C: [frothing] That's impossible! It's the most expensive player on the planet! I paid $8,000 for that DVD player! It's made of precious metals! It has to be the best because it costs the most! Your product is the problem! I demand a new disc!
Me: Sir, there's nothing we can do to make it play on your Marantz. If you call Marantz they will confirm it will not play burned media. I suggest you go purchase a cheap $99 upscaling DVD player at Wal-Mart. It will play our discs just fine and with a quaility indistinguishable from your Marantz.
C: [completely unhinged] That's insane! How could a $69 player work better than my platinum-encased $8,000 Marantz? It must be your disc at fault!
Eventually I convince the client that reality does indeed exist. They try the cheap player. They see it work. They try the same disc in their gold-plated uber-player and it doesn't work. They feel like complete asses for spending that kind of dough on a DVD player. Next client, please.
Barnum was right.
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Remember how compact discs which broke the spec weren't allowed to be labeled with the philips CD logo? You're going to see Blu-Ray on anything burned to a Blu-Ray disc, whether it will play in anything in particular or not.
And if you'll recall, every time someone has tried anything like this, it's always either been hideously easy to crack or it's been a compatibility nightmare that backfires. Retrofitting a completely different DRM scheme onto an existing format is almost impossible for these two reasons.
So, to use your example, once BD+ is cracked (and it will be, and the crack will become widespread just like DeCSS), Sony can either do minor revisions of BD+ (which will again get cracked) and retain compatibility with t
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Not that it matters. 1.1 is all 99% of people will ever need... who needs online content on your bluray player? It'll all be advertising anyway.
Maybe in 5-10 years when downloads become popular.. but by then all bluray players will have some kind of 2.0 support and be able to participate in that when it happens.
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I'm guessing most Players will be profile 1.1 (or maybe 1.2) except for computers and the PlayStation 3.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Insightful)
Fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this, every studio comes up with their own format! That way, there's tons of choices for the consumer! Want to watch a Univeral or Paramount movie? You have to buy a special player to play their formats. Think of the possibilities! Think of the competition! Think of the illegal downloads because no one would want to put up with that bullshit!
I think your analogy needs work.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case there was competition between the formats not only in which format was "better" in terms of storage quality (not to mention archival, access speed and other properties) but also even if one format was clearly superior which was better in terms of price and availability.
I don't think having both formats around was hurting anything as both are still in early adoption phases, most users don't have Blu-Ray or HD DVD yet and a large portion perhaps even a majority don't have the capabilities to use such formats (at least in the new abilities they provide) yet over the older standard.
I still see this as a bad thing and perhaps the "wars" are not over at all as Hard Drives, Flash drives and other storage options are coming down in price and are able to offer similar amounts of storage. The real contender in these "wars" as I see it could be download bandwidth rather than delivery of a physical piece of media.
In the end these media wars are good for the consumer. Take CDs for example, a format that won with relatively little competition. The way things are sold to consumers is that the new format is more expensive at first but as it takes hold and becomes dominant is prices drop to match the old cost with a margin determined by the cost of production. Music CDs are still fairly expensive and have not come down (as I believe) to a price comparable to that of Cassettes even though the older format has been more-or-less out of the market for several years now.
For Formats it is difficult to raise prices on consumers as there is an expectation that the prices will fall over time and consumers will need a reason to pay more with the information on the format primarily being a luxury good. However that expectation works both ways as consumers expect that two items of the same format will cost about the same on average.
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Heavy Goods Vehicles / Trucks for the first month on the right side
then cars / bikes later on
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Off-topic: We do drive on the right (correct) side of the road, it is just those strange foreigners who insist on driving on the wrong ('right-hand') side of the road
Better post next time (Score:2, Informative)
Which enjoyed better success in professional [wikipedia.org] settings.
Mini-disc became Mini-HD [wikipedia.org]
Memory stick is still being used. [wikipedia.org]
Thanks for the misinformation Sony fanboy (Score:5, Informative)
So what? Macs have better success in desktop publishing than PCs, that doesn't change that fact that 90%+ of all computers are PCs.
Mini-disc became Mini-HD
And no one but Sony uses either of them.
Memory stick is still being used.
by Sony products. Face it, Sony has a poor track record for format introductions. Want some more examples?
DAT (digital audio tape) [wikipedia.org]
"Universal" Media Disc (UMD) [wikipedia.org]
Super Audio CD (SACD) [wikipedia.org]
ATRAC [engadget.com]
Slow down there Sony hater (Score:5, Informative)
Compact Disc : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc [wikipedia.org]
3.5" Floppy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#New_3.0-3.5.22_formats [wikipedia.org]
Betacam : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam [wikipedia.org]
And Mini-disc is very popular in Asia. Just because it failed in your small part of the world doesn't mean it didn't take off somewhere where there's an actual population bassin.
It's funny how people always bash Sony for even trying to bring new stuff out to market.
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Not true.
BetaCam is the dominant professional video format, but is completely different from BetaMax. Sony just likes to put "Beta" in front of its video equipment, since the path of the tape through the machine looks like the Greek letter Beta.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing that I find unfamthomable is the use of some of the colors on the road.
For example they only use white paint for the lines. In the States they use white and yellow. You can tell the difference real quick which lanes are for your direction of traffic (white) and which is the divider line (yellow). I've had more than a few moments of panic where I could not tell for the life of me which lanes were which.
I take that back there are two things about driving in the UK, the second is do you people believe in F'ing street/road signs? Considering that the names of the streets change every 3 blocks and they don't run in a straight line more than 25 yards at a go, it would be simply amazing to have both the street and the cross street names on a sign, you are lucky just to even have a cross street that you can see from the road you are travelling on.
I foresee a GPS in my immediate future.
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The general idea with telling the difference is that it is two-way unless it says otherwise, so your side is for you and the other side is for other people. If there are two lanes then it is normally either a dual-carriage way or you get the short gaps or
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Funny)
I bet you post comments on YouTube.
Err. (Score:5, Funny)
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Quite how ths got marked inightful is a mystery. HD-DVD is (or now, was) the official standard for HD and was sanctioned by the DVD standards body, the DVD Forum. BluRay was the non-standard bully boy. After all the previous wars, the whole point was there is a DVD standards body who decide upon updates and new features in conjunction with the various manufacturers - SOny decided to go off on a tangent (again) but
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Informative)
SOny decided to go off on a tangent...
and so on, and so on... a little research is in order, before throwing on the Sony Troll hat.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Insightful)
Although it would make crossing the borders interesting.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Informative)
My theory about why it failed is that this was the same time the government decided we needed to slow down on our huge highway system. So 70+ Mph roads were reduced to 55 Mph. About the same time, there was an attempt to introduce the Metric system, requiring cars to have kph on their dials and Speed Limit signs to include it as well. The problem (my theory) is that they chose to equate 55 Mph to 80 Kph. It didn't take a calculator to figure out that 80 Kph is closer to 50 Mph, because it was clearly obvious on your own speedometer! So drivers eschewed the Metric system so they didn't have to slow down even more. If the powers that be had had the greenest of green marketing team, even they would have realized posting 90 Kph (almost 56 Mph) would have garnered more public acceptance.
But as a result of the attempt, we now live in a perpetual limbo. Gas and milk are sold by the gallon. Cola (soda pop, whatever you call it) is sold by the liter. Everyday life is measured in inches, feet, yards, and miles, while anything scientific is carried out in meters. Dry medicine is measured in milligrams, but our weight in pounds. Sigh...
Xesdeeni
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Note that PCB design, to a large extent, is still done in mils - which is 1/1000 of an inch. Converting millimeters to mils is a common occurrence, and woe be the designer that confuses the two.
Its peace in our time! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is of course great news (that the war is over - nothing to do with who won), but having forked out for a Blu-Ray disc lately (running around $50 over here) I can honestly say that I wish I had not fallen for the blandishments of that sales guy who told me I should buy a smaller, but much higher definition, TV.
If I had my buying decision over I would say after the initial technogasm brought on by seeing every hair on the actor's heads, you very quickly forget about the quality and just wish your screen was bigger. (Apparently this is a common effect.)
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I'm happy I decided to wait
Rest In Peace, HD-DVD (Score:4, Funny)
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Sony won a format war... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sony won a format war... (Score:5, Insightful)
This might explain why it didn't fail. Companies prefer it when the standards body isn't the same organisation as their rival. There's always a risk that the standard might change specifically to favour one manufacturer.
Who says they have won anything yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.nhl.com/players/8459534.html [nhl.com]
OK, so they lost this round (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll still turn to Toshiba for relevant hardware needs. The company laptops are Toshiba, and they're solid, reliable machines.
And since Sony stuck that effing rootkit on their CD's, I decided I will never, ever voluntarily have anything to do with that company again for any reason. The last Sony hardware I saw was a kind of "all in one" stereo system some department store sold to my great aunt. All design, all plastic, no performance. For what she paid, it sucks. Too bad...they used to be the gold s
So... (Score:3, Funny)
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In fact, if Blu-ray is successful, then this could be a major victory for Sony. With the complexity and compatibility problems of the Blu-ray specification, the Playstation 3 is pretty much the only Blu-ray player worth getting. I predict other manufacturers are going to struggle to produce Blu-ray players that can compete.
The real competition wasn't HD DVD... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Music is already like that. Some store their music as round plastic-discs. Others on a hard-disc. Others on flash-based music-players or any combination of these. It doesn't matter. It's the same
It's not like VHS vs DVD anymore (Score:2)
VHS sucked. Rewinding/forwarding sucked on VHS (although DRM-crap on DVDs sure is trying to make it hard to sabotage a paying customer's experience with ads/fbi_warning/regioning). It was the same difference between cassette and CDs.
Notice that music didn't move to Music DVDs. It went straight to digital.
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10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:5, Interesting)
With Blu-ray, almost all Blu-ray players in existence are Playstation 3 consoles. As far as I'm aware, no one has managed a region-free version of this.
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Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution here is to set sane release dates for stuff (both in cinema and on disc) instead of locking out your customers (also, there are a lot of suggestions that region coding is an illegal restriction on free trade... shame no one's sued the studios yet).
Honestly, if you release stuff in one country before another, you really can't complain when people take it upon themselves to import it (through legal or illegal means).
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The PS3 is only region encoded for DVDs and PS2 games.
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The PS3 is only region encoded for DVDs and PS2 games.
Seeing as Region 1 and Region 2 aren't the Blu-ray regions, I'll have to ask where the discs and PS3 are from?
For example, if by Region 1, you mean USA and by Region 2, you mean Japan, be aware that those two areas are now in the same region, for Blu-r
It ain't over till the fat lady sings (Score:4, Informative)
PS3 Success? (Score:2)
Re:PS3 Success? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
Where Does This Leave the Xbox? (Score:2)
However, I think it's going to be a long road for BluRay to get to a point where it will move past DVD, and it will take far longer than DVD took to move past VHS. Arguably, DVD only really accelerated in popularity when people realised that they could be copied, the purchase of blank DVD media and DVD writers t
Re:Where Does This Leave the Xbox? (Score:5, Informative)
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When you say 'obsolete' drive, are you talking about the built in DVD, which they chose for the data speeds (allowing, for example Devil May Cry 4 to be as fast to load as it is on the PS3, which has a *20+ minute install routine* or are you talking about the external and optional HD-DVD drive?
If HD-DVD truly is no longer being produced, we'll see an external Blu-Ray drive for the 360 before year's end. Knowing Microsoft, it's been ready for mass-production for at least a year.
For Sale (Score:5, Funny)
(Please...)
blu-ray is better on a technical level. (Score:2)
BD-R Prices (Score:3, Insightful)
I figure my BD-R threshold is about $5 per disk. Presently they seem to be going for $15-$22 per disk. I'll be willing to buy a BD-R reader/burner when 25GB single layer BD-R's are at $5, which interestingly is the price of CD-Rs when I finally decided to make the switch from floppies in 1996. That was a 450 fold increase in media size. CD-R to DVD-R was a 6 fold increase. I'll be content with another 6 fold increase.
Hopefully BD/BD-R support for MythTV will be available by then.
Betamax wins! (Score:3, Insightful)
I own an HD-DVD player - but the Blue-Ray *disk* format is superior and more extensible than the HD-DVD disk. Blue-ray will increase in capacity with time, as it was designed to do. HD-DVD didn't really have this in mind it was for the most part, easier to implement and designed specifically for carrying HD video content. Blue-ray carries with it an entire execution environment within the player - one of the reasons for the difficulty that vendors have had complying with the specification.
Note that the disk format has nothing at all to do with the content format. Almost all HD-DVD's contain SMPTE VC-1 content, but there is a mix of VC-1 and H.264 within Blue-ray disks. Blue-ray and hd-dvd are capable of playing other stream types.
The "Blue-ray" logo really represents just a particular disk format and a player that has a certain set of capabilities.
Glad to see the non-noob tech prevail.
HD TV Still On The Sidelines (Score:4, Insightful)
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I, on the other hand, am something of a movie buff, I got into DVD in a fairly big way and own 500+ movies (excluding porn and TV shows). T
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Actually, at the time of writing, 45% in the Slashdot poll claims not to care about Blu-ray. Hardly everyone, even if Slashdot was representative of humanity as a whole.
Re:Sony's CEO memo, 18-02-2008 (Score:2)
Doh =(
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If only they gave it to MS for free (Score:2)
So instead of loosing $250m 1 year ago, they are loosing it now. Tip for toshiba, if your marketing sucks copy the competitor, asap quickly.
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seriously i don't get this attitude that it's ONLY 720p. only 2 years ago people would cream their pants over 720p, and now it's somehow defunct?
have people even SEEN a 720p movie on a good tv? it's amazing. and to qualify i HAVE a 1080p 70" inch, and i still select 720p movies over 1080p because of speed of the download and the quality difference is at time not noticable.