high-definition maundering.

so, there's this whole "hi def" thing going on. a "format war." toshiba has come out with the first volley, the HD-DVD player. last week, at the fabled E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo, sony debuted their playstation3, complete with promised blu-ray in both models.

from the technology side, i believe i understand the various lines that have been drawn. HD-DVD is cheaper. it's high definition. blu-ray is the (slightly) better technical standard. its algorithm allows more data to be stored on the discs. where things get confusing is when the numbers start getting involved. i think 1080p is the best, but is 720p better than 1080i? and what is "standard definition" anyway?

the political (if you will) lines are a little harder to draw. microsoft, toshiba, and intel are the flag-wavers for HD-DVD. sony is the main voice for blu-ray. because of this, a lot of people want to draw comparisons to sony's previous format failures: betamax, minidisk, memory stick, and UMD. but they're missing a main point there. the reason these technologies failed in the market is because they were developed by sony and kept exclusive to sony. sony refused to license the technology, or at least, to license it at a reasonably price. but a quick glance at the blu-ray homepage shows very quickly that this isn't just another sony vs everyone else fight. this time, sony is leading a veritable consortium of developers and collaborators.

now, i don't have an HDTV, and i'm certainly not planning on dropping $600 for a PS3. i'm also not going to drop $400 on an xbox360, which is the whole reason this format war exists in the first place. yes. i'm actually blaming this whole mess on the xbox *grin* sony and microsoft are rivals in the console industry. they're certainly not rivals anywhere else; sony's computers run microsoft windows, and windows talks happily to the myriad of sony devices available. if ms hadn't jumped into the console fray, i don't believe we'd be seeing this battle. but because it did, and because sony is trying to use the PS3 to lever blu-ray into people's homes the way it banked on people buying the PS2 to be a cheap DVD player, micorsoft has to fight them.

i'm probably just going to wait until my relatively new tv dies, and hope by that time dual-format drives have been on the market long enough to be cheap.