Exactly, price and marketing and product availability will determine the winner. Most people are ignorant to disc size, resolution etc.

Right now blu ray has the edge in studio support. That's why I think they will win out evnetually. They'll have the most movies that people want to buy. The resolution etc. only matters to the videophiles who know and understand that stuff. Not to the mass market who will determine which format wins.

Some pics of the blu-ray & HD-DVD players:

http://forums.audioreview.com/showthread.php?t=14190the

These are all different technologies, none of them will be dropped. There won't be a standard, we will have many different types forever. I think you better start reading/learning while you wait, plenty of info on the net why one is better or worse than another.

Of course the advantage to waiting a bit longer is all of the technologies are improving and dropping in price. Plasma is the best example with pretty prevalent burn in risk in early models, and nearly non existant risk now.

Personally, I'm waiting until 1080p sets in the 51" size or so can be had in these black friday type sales for $800-1000 like some regular RPTV HD sets that don't do 1080p have been recently.

Want to be as future proof as possible when I upgrade. I'm not in a huge rush anyway as I'm grad student and that's still really more than I can afford right now.

Not to mention it doesn't make much sense to buy a big, pain in the but to move (even if they are lighter these days) tv when I'm moving every year or two lately.

I'm very interested in seeing how well the PS3 performs as a BlueRay player and a DVD player. Given Sony's track record on the PS2, it was a LOUSY dvd player, remember all of those DVDs that it couldn't play? Remember the PS2 Compatible stickers that you would see on the dvds?
Lets hope Sony learned from their mistakes with the PS2 and provides a decent playing DVD and Blueray player with the PS3.

Yep, I certainly won't be using my PS3 as a DVD player, since it'll already be getting be getting plenty of wear just from the games. Maybe initially, if it's the only player available, but I will also be getting a standalone unit ASAP.

But didn't VHS dominate because it had a longer recording time? Also, wasn't Betamax available a few years before VHS came out?

No, both myths. VHS won because Sony screwed up, and JVC beat them with marketing and market penetration. Well, I guess I should say that VHS was perceived as having a longer recording time, and JVC took advantage of that in its marketing. So I suppose you could say that was the reason it won, even though it was not true.

Don't forget the porno advantage. :D

The DVD player in the later PS2 models wasn't bad at all (especially in the latest slimline PS2s). I doubt they'll be making the same mistake with Blu-ray in PS3s since Blu-ray is their baby so they'll be wanting to do their best to push the format as much as possible.

As I recall in the early 80's (I was only around 12 yrs old at that time), Beta could only hold two hours of information, where as VHS could hold six hours.

Beta was out for some time before VHS.

Some of the BD players are nice looking, others don't look like anything great. The Hd-dvd players don't look right either.

Looking at the pics on thedigitalbits.com, we have Hd-dvd players from Toshiba and RCA(which is just a Toshiba cloned deck) against Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sharp, Phillips and, at least at the start of the spring, Samsung. That says alot from the CE side of things.

Quote David H:
As I recall in the early 80's (I was only around 12 yrs old at that time), Beta could only hold two hours of information, where as VHS could hold six hours.

Beta was out for some time before VHS.

Not ture. There were three different recording options for a beta becasue I still have my Sony (really my parents old one) that still works. The recording were BETA I (VHS SP mode), BETA II (VHS LP mode), and BEAT III (VHS SLP mode). The BETA III mode would hold 480 minutes of video and the picture quality was the same as a VHS running in SP mode. BETA was better buy Sony messed up big time.