Today I made the plunge and finally got off the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format fence and bought a PS3 system.

There were several reasons for this; first I did NOT buy it because I love Blu-Ray. I like that it has multiple studio and vendor support as well as about 25GB storage per layer, but the hardware for burning those discs is so new it makes the cost of production and third-party devices pretty high. That said, I have been watching Blu-Ray gain progressively more market share and seeing a number of more watch-worthy titles released on that format than HD-DVD. Also, in a less “scientific” approach I noticed a lot more people hanging around and buying from the BD movie shelf than the HD-DVD section at the local Fry’s and the shelf space dedicated to Blu-Ray movies is larger in almost all retail outlets I’ve been in that have them for sale.

One other item of note regarding the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war is that Sony already has considerable legs under the BD format with their alternate professional product line of XDCAM. This is also a blue laser format and is aimed at broadcasters and professional videographers. XDCAM has been around since 2003, well before consumer BD and the PS3 came out in , so even if the Blu-Ray consumer format somehow lost steam and died next year, Sony would continue to chug along with broadcasters and “big media” selling the same underlying technology to a different market. Just like they did when Betamax lost the Beta/VHS format war around 1988 and they sold it’s variant “Betacam” and later “Betacam-SP” to the broadcast industry becoming the defacto tape standard which is still in heavy use today. Continue reading ‘My new PS3 - Go! Go! Blu-Ray!’