HD DVD

Boasting the immense support of Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Intel, Microsoft and even Universal Studios, HD DVD is being touted as the High Definition format of choice. Personally, we can see the merits of both systems, but HD DVD has a big jump on the market, by virtue of having gotten there first!

HD DVD players and discs hit the shops ahead of Blu-ray. Critics and consumers latched onto the format quickly, applauding its relative cheapness and its staggering interactivity as key determinants in making their choice. Certainly the lower production costs associated with HD DVD make it a sure fire commercial success. A dual layer HD DVD offers six times normal capacity of a conventional single layer disc.

They’re hardier than their Blu-ray rivals too. Remember back in the day when we were told you could smear jam all over your precious CD’s and DVD’s, throw them around the room and still enjoy untroubled playback? Sad to say that’s never been the case, but HD DVD is a more hands-on format than Blu-ray, simply because information is stored further away from the surface of the disk, clearly making it less prone to damage.

We’re not even going to get into the debate about whether HD DVD or Blu-ray offers the best quality audio / visual playback! Like we said, both formats have their proponents and at 36 MBPS, both formats share an identical data transfer rate.

But we can say (quite objectively) that as the fully ‘future proofed’ purveyor of dual format discs, HD DVD takes the plaudits for accessibility. It means consumers can start compiling their High Definition library of discs right now and, thanks to the dual formatting, enjoy using them on their existing Standard Definition machines. (The good news is there’s already a whole heap of discs to choose from, ranging from Serenity to The Last Samurai.)

HD DVD: it’s the “look and sound of perfect”.