Will Hybrid Players End the Format War?

flyhalf writes "A new report says that hybrid players will force an early end to the HD DVD/Blu-ray format wars. Some of the projections seem optimistic: $200 hybrid players by 2009 and several manufacturers cranking them out. But reality will likely be different: 'standalone units of any format aren't selling terribly well. Recent research determined that 695,000 consumers owned either a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, but most of those are tied to a console — 400,000 of the 425,000 Blu-ray players sold by the end of 2007 were PlayStation 3s and 150,000 of the 270,000 HD DVD players were Xbox 360 add-ons.' Most importantly, consumers aren't early adopters: 'DVD players needed over a decade to supersede the VCR in the living rooms of the United States and there is little reason to believe that HD DVD and Blu-ray player adoption will outpace that of the DVD.'"

Comments

Sony = Duh?

[fyngyrz]

Yeah, Sony has 400k+ blue-ray players available in the US in the form of PS3's at this point, all right; but first, not all of those have been sold...

And second, Sony totally blew it when they built the PS3 Blue-Ray capabilities; it can't play 720p, only 480p or 1080p, which means that a very large proportion of in-place US HDTV sets couldn't use anything but 480p, which is pretty much the same as a progressive scan standard DVD in terms of resolution. Oddly, the PS3 will do 720p for games. Just not for DVDs.

The reason that 720p is important is because for the LCD market, 1080p sets were rare until very recently. 720p was the top 'P' resolution available (it's actually the "middle" resolution in standard HDTV, 1080, 720, 480) though there are some uncommon ones and some variants, like 24 FPS stuff for 1:1 movie compatibility, and some TVs could scale 1080i down to 720p, or even display 1080i, just not 1080p.

Third, Sony's balking at allowing prawn into the format (like they did for betamax), which is (IMHO) likely to deal them another severe blow. It seems like they have developed an unmatchable expertise at shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:Sony = Duh?

[LionMage]

Just wanted to point out, you can set the PS3 to output 1080i (which apparently the PS3 can do easily enough since there is no scaling required for this operation). For users who want to play Blu-Ray movies, they can set the output preference to 1080i while watching movies, and 720p for games -- which is what the friendly ArsTechnica folks had recommended for a while now.

Still waiting on a PS3 firmware update that lets users set separate preferences (in a rational way) for Blu-Ray playback and game play. I bought my Sharp Aquos LCD TV before the Aquos line started getting 1080p support; my TV is 720p native, though it does a good job with 1080i material. (The actual LCD panel supports 768 scanlines, so no matter whether I'm watching 720p or 1080i source material, there's some kind of scaling going on behind the scenes.)

Disk sale comparison here:

[guidryp]

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/

From the looks of things it is extremely close, Blu Ray is coming on strong recently.