Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

In that case, you'd want the PS3, since the Blu-ray is built in. X-Box 360 has HD-DVD support, but only as an add-on drive you have to purchase seperately.

Amazon price for PS3 (60GB drive): $499
Amazon price for XBox 360 (20GB drive): $350 + $180 for add-on drive = $530

Amazon also has a bundle that includes:
XBox 360 Elite (with 120GB drive)
HD-DVD add-on drive
300 and King Kong on HD-DVD
Mail-in deal to get five free HD-DVD movies

...all for $599. Mind, it's not *any* five HD-DVD movies. There's five categories of three possible choices each. It means you'd end up with a copy of U-571, The Perfect Storm, or We Were Soldiers whether you liked it or not (or, depending on your lack of preference, the more banal category may be between Four Brothers, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow).

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Well, if you're going -solely- for the price, yes, the PS3 then looks like a much better choice.

But you must also factor in the catalog of games, as well. Admittedly, the promise of FFXIII for the PS3 is nice... but also distant in the future.

'Course, the one game to end all games will be out for both systems...

*bows before the might of Rock Band*

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I'm in it for the Kingdom Hearts sequels. Like a motherfucker.

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Mmm, the bizarre yet fun blend of Square RPGs and Disney franchises.

...Kingdom Hearts 2 still -wins- for having a Steamboat Willie land and TRON. I can't wait to see how they try to top that in a third title...

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It wins more for getting Bruce Boxleitner to come back and reprise the role of Tron. Still, first time that Leon spoke up in that game, I was like, dude, where's Boreanaz?

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Just found out that the PS3 also has a five free movie deal -- and every category has at least one movie I wouldn't mind owning. Okay, maybe "wouldn't mind" is a bit strong for Chicken Little, but it's better than Pearl Harbor or The Guardian.

Actually, come to look at it, category five doesn't really have anything that jumps out: Kiss of the Dragon, The Omen (2006), The Transporter 2, Species, Hart's War, or The Last Waltz.

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Well, going through Amazon's offerings, it appears that HD-DVD (read: Universal with some support from Warner and Paramount) is making a more concentrated effort at releasing older titles (films made 10-30 years ago), while the Blu-Ray consortium (read: Sony, Disney, and Lionsgate, with some support from Warner and Paramount) is focusing more heavily on films made in the last five years.

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You are what big companies are afraid of...A clever customer..

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Yeah, I'm a bastard like that.

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Betcha none of y'all remember the Beta/VHS wars. XD *revels in oldness*

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Beta? There was a war between videocasettes and fish?

*flees*

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*dies a little inside*

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Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week, try the veal!

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I do remember that Dad appeared in a production of West Side Story that he had a tape of, but we could never watch said tape because it was Beta.

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Beta vs. VHS was a big deal in my household when I was in pre-school. And the Wikiepedia article here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war) is actually fascinating.

Time was, you could go into a video store (not a Blockbuster, mind you, but usually something mom and pop called something pitiful like Video Hut) and there were about six different formats to differentiate. Movies were on VHS, Betamax, and several different DVD precursors. We briefly owned a CED player (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc), but we also adopted VHS pretty early on instead of Beta.

On a side note, we did use Beta and SVHS in video production classes I took as recently as 1997. In fact, we did all our video editing on a reconfigured Commodore 64 computer(!!).

I love antique technology. Bury me with an 8-track or something, seriously.

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I have a record player, so I'm down with that.

Actually, Beta is still the preferred format for shot-on-physical-video productions (like PBS and low-budget cable reality series), since it does offer superior picture and sound. The article you linked is a good analysis of why it died as a home video product, however.

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The article you linked is a good analysis of why it died as a home video product, however.

Yes, and why economists and marketing analysts are still scratching their heads over why the public overwhelmingly went with the format nobody thought they would! Heck, by that logic, we'll all have Blu-Ray units in the next five years! ;)

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Which logic is that? *blink*

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Oh, I just think of Blu-Ray as being the inferior format, but customers could prove me wrong. I don't even have an HD TV yet, so who'm I to judge?

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In terms of pure capacity, Blu-ray outshines HD-DVD. In terms of quality, most tests have found the two to be comparable in terms of audio and video. There's a couple of reasons for this. First is that HD-DVD uses dual-layer discs while Blu-ray tends to use single-layer. Second is that they're starting to hit the point where human perception won't be able to discern a distinct difference in visual quality, so even if Blu-ray does move to double-layer discs and ups the level of detail, Joe Consumer will really only be able to register it as a statistic. From a sensory perspective, it might as well be the slightly-less detailed-but-who-can-tell HD-DVD.

HD-DVD has more titles out right now, almost entirely due to Universal's aggressive release schedule. Blu-ray has taken a blow in this area because 20th Century Fox refuses to release more high-def titles until the DRM and encryption protocols are 100% hacker-proof. Have fun waiting, guys. There's also some speculation that Blu-ray's two biggest supporters -- Sony and Disney -- are waiting for the holiday season to really blitz the market with titles, hoping to use the surge to definitively win the format war.

One weird issue that Blu-ray discs have is that the data is stored much closer to the discs surface than in HD-DVD or standard DVD, meaning a few scratches in the wrong places can be really devastating. A few manufacturers combat this issue by adding an anti-scratch coating.

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Very interesting! It's hard to say which is "better," then. I wonder about a potential player that could handle both formats. Would that be possible?

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Blu-ray has scratch-resistant surface..At least that's what i heard...

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Depends on the disc manufacturer, from what I understand, but it may have been universally adopted at this point.

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Possible, yes. LG has one out now that unfortunately can't handle some of the higher level functions of one of the two formats (I forget which). It costs 1200 dollars -- more than buying an HD-DVD and Blu-ray box separately.

Another one is coming out that will have full functionality for both, but again, the price is such that you might as well buy two dedicated boxes.

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onefishjyuufish.livejournal.com

Mmmm, format war.

It smacks of console wars, with sort of the same basis - no one wants to think they've made a bad/uninformed/hasty decision and wasted (potentially) lots of money or missed out on something they wanted by going with one over the other.

As with all things related to a person's money, there is hyper-defensiveness and knee jerk asshattery. Whee!

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