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Careful - you might upset the fanboys with that kind of talk...

...and cause one of them to have a little bit of a hissy fit. :)

>>But in all these cases a standard had been agreed upon.<<

This is true; however, one thing to consider is that each of the standards you refer to were for essentially discrete technologies. The new video technologies are convergence products - they combine advanced video with advanced audio and and advanced communication, using much more sophisticated hardware and software to tie it all together.

The other thing to consider is that each of the standards you refer to contained no backward compatibility. CD players were a new thing - there wasn't a previous consumer digital device using optical media. VCRs were a new thing - there wasn't a previous consumer rotating-head cassette-type video machine. DVD was a new thing.

The current consumer devices are expected to have backward compatibility with previous technologies (CD, DVD-V/A, etc). This adds additional complexity to an already complex device.

>>If the standard is still evolving when you buy something, you are much more than an early adopter. You are buying the beta version of something<<

This is true; however, market realities caused this, not the companies or the technology. By any objective standard, HD-DVD is a more straightforward design - it's more of an evolutionary product. Detractors might call it simplistic or limited, but the fact is that it's somewhat less complex than Blu-ray, so the standard was completed first, and got to market first. Blu-ray was not ready for market, but there was no choice - the Blu-ray camp had to release what they had at the time, or HD-DVD would have gained the upper hand just by being first and having a window of no competition. If I were in charge of marketing at the BDA, I would have done exactly what they did.

>>You are buying the beta version of something, and you should be warned in big print....Do the makers of BD players tell you that?<<

Some do. As I mentioned yesterday in this post, Sony tells you this in the manual. It's definitely not in big print though, and neither the content providers nor the device manufacturers are going out of their way to make this well-known.

The unintended consequence is that not making this sort of information clear will actually help to prevent the adoption of hi-def formats. Based on the perceived sophistication and more impressive-looking specsheets, Blu-ray is being touted by a vocal group of zealots as the better of the two available formats. This actually backfires, because when people who might be interested in getting a hi-def player to go with their HDTV do their typically limited research, they discover that Blu-ray appears to be problematic and not ready for primetime.

If they've been exposed to the fanboy hype (which is hard to avoid if you do your research on the Interwebs), they'll assume that if the "better" format has this many problems, then the other format must be much worse.

It's actually the opposite - HD DVD has relatively few problems by comparison. Yes, it's less sophisticated, but it's way more than adequate for someone who just wants to watch hi-def movies using the HDTV and HTIB they bought at Best Buy. In fact, it even works well on high-end HT gear, despite the Blu-ray fanboys' attempts to cast it as ghetto.

An early adopter such as you who expects the first batch or two of products to be more "baked," and doesn't want to be an unwitting beta test guinea pig, should probably be looking at HD DVD if you're going to dabble in hi-def on silver discs. Leave Blu-ray to the geeks who don't mind weekly updates, early obsolescence, and constant incompatibility issues :-) And pay no attention to the fanboys - neither format is "better" than the other. They each have pros and cons; there's no clear winner no matter what the cheerleaders shout.

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