More on the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war

Uncategorized 1 Minute

The good folks at LG Electronics have been kind enough to send me a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive (but I have to send it back in two weeks). And the good folks at Netflix have been kind enough to take my $16.99 and send me two HD-DVD movies and one Blu-ray disk, all scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

So maybe I don’t have to take sides.

Oh, and in that same post I said:

I was an early adopter of Betamax…

I believe that with those words I officially classified myself as old. If you are also old enough to remember when Betamax hardware and Beta movies were actually new, then you too are old.

Published by Ed Bott

Published

11 thoughts on “More on the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war”

  1. Hey! I resemble that remark. I too had the good ol’ Sony Betamax player sitting on the TV, for a while, way back when.

  3. Ed, I’d love to hear more about your experiences with the combination drive, especially in terms of what software you need to play everything. I’d like to know that we can simply install one program that’ll play both formats interchangeably.

    Steve, I was a LaserDisc fan for a long time. I was quite fond of the system, mostly because it gave me a pipeline to see some truly oddball films from Japan and Hong Kong. DVD has since eclipsed and surpassed everything LD has done — especially in terms of the cost involved. But it was fun while it lasted. I still have one of the 1993 LaserDisc catalogs from Japan that has cover shots of all the movies listed in there, and there’s stuff there that I have not yet seen anywhere on DVD.

  4. LaserDisc. I am so busted! I had one of the first Pioneer models, with the discs the size of LP records that you had to flip after an hour. Pretty cool, but damn…

  5. Damn, this takes me back. I was a little too young to remember Betamax, but Laserdisc certainly is still ingrained in my mind. Figures it would be Sony again taking sides.

    The combo players will probably make it all moot, just like the combo DVD+-R crap, but I have heard that the LG players don’t support the extra features that HD DVD provides.

  6. I thought that LG player is not fully certified for HD-DVD…i wonder if it’s just the ethernet support. I think i read that HD-DVDs just play, there’s no menu (hence no certification)

    My friend had a laserdisc player, probably the same pioneer as above, but he only played dodgy VCDs from Asia – you had about 3 discs per movie!

    matt.

  8. It was just 4 years ago that I finally broke down and tossed my 300+ Beta tapes, after my third or fourth beta recorder finally bit the dust.

    And it was only two years ago I gave away my Laserdisc collection (including a mint condition copy of “Help!”) after my top loader disc player died.

  9. It’s amazing what I used to have in the LD collection. I’ve still got my box set of “Terminator 2” sitting around, and I’d hate to just pitch it.

    Matt: I actually stopped picking up LDs not long after VCDs started becoming more readily available. I’ve still got a fair number of movies on that format that aren’t available in the U.S. yet.

  10. I was an early adopter of Betamax. Yep, still have a box full of tapes sitting in the storage room with the hope that I’ll come across some poor soul who has a working player they want to give away.

    I tend to keep to much stuff… but at least I tossed out my old bag phone and my old 8086 PC (circa 1986) last year! My wife was so proud of me.

Comments are closed.