for the love of god people. we AREN'T living in the days of betamax and vhs where they are so radically different and the parts are huge and take up a lot of space in the box(less now but back years ago, open up a 20 year old player and everythings massive.
the ONLY difference between hd-dvd drives and bluray drives is the laser. i think one of the reasons for hd-dvd drive costs being lower is that, the reading laser is still red or whatever, and so the one laser can read everything dvd thats current. but blu ray uses a blue lasers and so needs more lasers. but the fact is, those lasers are in the £50-100 region at the moment because they are selling on a TINY scale comparatively. when 5 million lasers are made a year they can cost say £100 each. when they make 5 million a week, in 500 different factories, that all compete to sell at a lower price, and manufacturing quality increases so more work per batch, and they ship in bigger quantities and so on, cost comes down to £50 a laser, then £20, then £10 and then £5.
there won't be a winner, so theres no point arguing about it, in a year you'll be able to get a blu ray/hd-dvd combo drive that reads and writes both for £150, and in 3 years you'll be able to get one for £30.
there is one small reason that blu ray will be the most used at first and it WILL be the most popular.
go try buy a PC hd-dvd burner, then go try and buy a blu ray dvd burner, case closed.
as for resolution, you can argue all you want. but go take any game and play on a crt that can do any res fine without upscaling issues. now set your best looking game to entirely max quality, and res at 480p , then set the game to 1080p and tell me, on exactly the same size crt, that 1080p doesn't look a million times better. the only thing i don't get, is the massive industry push for high def screens, they didn't go with 768p, but 720p so every screen has to upscale 720p, madness. now despite the massive push, most really don't upscale standard def very well at all, some screens are freaking awful at it, and theres next to no high def content available. if they put in proper chips, or sky boxes/virgin boxes upscaled properly so they output at 720/1080 so a high def screen looks good all the time. its all madness i tell you, madness. the supposed best screens around are still £2000 plasma's with a 1024x768 res and i can't explain that either.
as for games, xbox 360 has the better line up, the ps3 will level out so get whatever you want. but as is the case for every console, after the first year/two pc versions of most games are released more and more often at the same time as consoles, and you'd expect a LOT of the big releases to hit the PC after a 6 months anyway. for me, consoles are only worth having for the first 2 years after launch, if that, then pc's get the better games. theres also been an incredibly obvious lull in 360 games for the last 2-3 months, and bar the darkness, theres no big releases for another 2 months really assuming most of the dates don't slip.
