All,

I dropped in to Best Buy yesterday and they had a Samsung Blu-Ray player ($999) playing on to a 1080p Samsung LCD ($3000+), and boy it looked pretty nice.

They had some scenes from Chicken Little, and without question those were the best to show off the format. You could resolve so much detail, it was pretty amazing. I didn't see any noise or artifacting. Other movies - Pirates, Sahara, etc. - looked good, but it wasn't as big a difference.

Best Buy took down the HD-DVD display and replaced it with Blu-Ray, and the salesman was definitely pitching Blu-Ray as better. He said HD-DVD came from a 1080p source, but wasn't true 1080p, though he couldn't back that up with anything meaningful.

On an interesting note, he said that they still didn't have any cables rated for 1080p, and that the one they were using might have had some signal loss.

In a clear demonstration of them not being on commission, he suggested I wait a year and let the format wars settle. I might. Tough to drop $999 on a format that has 25 titles.

A year? I don't think so - it will take much longer than that, we may actually get stuck with both of them as both of them have advantages and disadvantages. Even if it's again a "Sony against the whole world" story (VHS versus Beta, episode 2), Sony is stubborn enough and has enough money to extend this war for years, in my opinion.

This might come as news to some, but Sony's stock has been sinking fast over the past 2 years. If their PS3 isn't a hit and I don't think it will be based on price and hardware overkill, then Blue Ray's demise could follow. I don't hate Sony's products, just their "do as we say and nobody gets hurt" attitude towards consumers.

I saw same set up there a couple of days ago. Pretty impressive.

This might come as news to some, but Sony's stock has been sinking fast over the past 2 years.

That certainly comes as news to me. Two years ago SNE was $35/share, today it's trading for about $45/share (a 28% gain). I think you may be a little behind the curve. It fell to a low of around $32 in November 2005, then rose sharply to around $50 at the end of last April. Personally I have a gain of over 30% on my Sony stock, and I'm quite happy with what Sir Howard is doing with the company.

http://finance.yahoo.com/charts#chart2:symbol=sne;range=2y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;logscale=on;source=

There is a fundamental difference in dynamics between the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray and the VHS/Betamax wars.

It's not unreasonable to build devices that can play both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. That wasn't the case with the tapes.

All,
Best Buy took down the HD-DVD display and replaced it with Blu-Ray, and the salesman was definitely pitching Blu-Ray as better. He said HD-DVD came from a 1080p source, but wasn't true 1080p, though he couldn't back that up with anything meaningful.

Because we all know Best Buy salesman are the authoritative source... :P Bet it wouldn't look that good if you used cheap cables other than the most expensive Monster cables too. :P

Glad you got to see it! I might have to wander over to Fry's in the next week and see if they have it setup too.