mindspider

Sure, maybe Sony did dev back in 2002/2003, but so what? The entire point of a business is to make $money$. Do you really believe that they've managed to make enough money to on blue-ray at this point to offset all of the development costs on the R&D (combining the concept stage with coming up with practical ways to actually make the disks and players)actual installation of production lines, and all of the money that they've poured into marketing the product to the big movie studios and game manufacturers? Doubtful. Just to be clear, I don't have any problem with the technology. From what I've heard I think that it will be superior in many ways to HD-DVD. Also, from what I've read, it will definitely be significantly more expensive to manufacture both the disks and the players. That's the difficulty. The companies that make the things, like most companies, want the largest return on investment. To ensure that they make their money back in a reasonable amount of time they will set initial prices on hardware and disks pretty high so that they can keep shareholders of their backs. After the bliss of buying a DVD for $20 there's no way I'm going to pay double that, HD or not. It's a guess, but I bet that there are a lot of other people out there that share that feeling. I'm not saying that blu-ray will fail, but that it will be a much more problematic contest that some of you seem to think.

Kizza, you need to re-check your facts. Film is still of higher "resolution" than HD cameras. HD is close, but doesn't quite get there. Many videophiles will definitely want to have some of their favorite films converted to whichever HD format comes out on top because, on an HD screen, they will look much better than the same movie on DVD. For me this will mean buying another copy of Blade Runner to go with my LD and my DVD.
As for the decision by to not include a next-gen drive in the 360, I'm fine with it. The last I looked the majority of people that are after a 360 want the version with the hard drive. The hardcore 360 gamer (the guys that likely already have a 360, xbox live, an extra controller, and at least 4 games) will be able to enjoy the games that can be expanded via with the extra data going on their hard drives. Those are the guys that the game companies get their money from. My kids have had every major system since the Genesis (the Saturn does not count) and they are major fans of each version of the xbox. I think that the Playstation and the PS2 were good machines, but Sony jerked us around when we had trouble with the PS2 right after it first came out. Shipping plus $120? Please. We did have a problem with our xbox too, but Microsoft had a shipping box delivered to my house on a Monday, I had the shipper pick it up on Tuesday, and it was back by Thursday. Customer service counts for a lot.