The cost of Peace
April 18, 2007The format war is over, but at a cost.
Yes, the format war between HD-DVD and blu-ray can finally end thanks to the LGBH100 (aka Super Multi blue). It’ll quite hapilly spin almost every disc under the sun, even those DVDs, which will be upscaled to the glorious 1080p. There is a downside to all this, the price. A cool 1000 of your English pounds will bag you one from John Lewis sometime in May. Samsung’s offering (BD-UP5000) won’t be around til the end of the year so it looks like those price tags aren’t going to be dropping any time soon. There’s not even support for HDi (to make the most of all those juicy new features) to justify the cost.
So, the format war is over? Well it might be when more companies release their offerings. The current lack of competition means that there isn’t a reason for LG to reduce the cost, even though it’s twice the cost it is in America. Too bad you can’t play movies on imported ones since titles are region coded. To be honest though, I’m not surprised at the expense, LG will have to pay for the privilige of showing the delights of both formats. It also looks a lot better than having two boxes, remotes and the separate disc trays.
