If you’re wondering whether you should buy an HD DVD player soon, a Blu-ray Disc player in a little while, or a dual-format player in a little while longer, I recommend you just wait a year or three and see how things pan out. Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray are competing formats vying to be the one that replaces DVD. They both hold a lot more data than current DVDs allowing for movies encoded in higher quality High Definition. From a technical perspective Blu-ray is generally considered superior, but the technically superior format doesn’t always win and there are significant benefits to HD DVD that may prove to be enough to beat out Blu-ray in the short term. Unless you have a very nice HD television you likely won’t notice much of an improvement over standard DVDs with either format, and if you do have a very nice HD television you can probably afford to waste a little money on a losing format so knock yourself out! In another few years every television sold will be fully HD-capable and that’s when this whole game will really start to play out.
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