the HD Guy

At the end of the 90s, we started replacing our VHS tapes, with tiny shiny discs providing a much better quality, some interactivity, and taking less room on the shelves: DVDs. The good news was, as long as you stay in your “region", you could get your DVDs from anywhere without having to worry.

Comes the world of High Definition… Unfortunately, the industry was unable to agree on one standard, and two of them appeared completely incompatible: HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

HD-DVD is lead by Toshiba, Hitachi and Microsoft and is technically closer to the previous generation making the transition itself easier for the manufacturers.

Blu-Ray is lead by Sony, with multiple Consumer Electronics manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Philips… and has a higher capacity per disk while being more expensive to manufacture.

But the real problem is that you cannot expect to have the same content on both formats: some of the movie studios have decided to release their movies exclusively on one of the other.

A good advice at this point: because the two technologies are completely incompatible, be careful that the high def DVD you purchase are compatible with the players they will be played on.

More later on the great HD DVD war…