Do any of you have the same concerns about putting out a large amount of money for a high end DVD player such as the DVD5 when high definition DVD players will be hitting the market place late next year?

RCA has announced that they will begin selling their HD DVD player by this time next year. And obviously Sony will be follow closely with their Blu Ray player.

Granted that it may take another year or so to see enough High Defintion DVD's in the rental stores and for sale to justify purchasing a new DVD player.

But the improvement in PQ certainly will justify the eventual purchase ... even with the scaler, the DVD5 will not come close to the PQ of HDTV. As good as the PQ is without the scaler I can easy see flaws compared to even a broadcast HDTV picture ... and D-VHS is even better.

So, do I want to put out about CA$6500 for a unit that will be obsolete in just a couple of years?

Bob

And, would you consider buying a high-end CD player with the hi-res audio formats out there. The SQ should be better with SACD and DVD-A, but the music is not better...
I feel the same thing will happen to the HD-DVD: a standard battle with no winner, and finally the death of both. The battle is in the mass market, do you think millions will change the player they've just bought for a hi-res one, and anyway they won't see any difference on their TVs.

So the answer is YES, i'll buy a high-end DVD player (the DVD5 is on order for home, but i'm biased), and No it won't be obsolete in a couple of years.

Emmanuel
Euphonie

All opinions are my own, and reflect those of the organisation i work for, even if not stipulated.

This debate takes me back about 10 years when 24bit/96KHz audio formats were 'on the horizon' and the discussion then was how sensible was it to buy an expensive CD player when it would soon be overtaken by better formats. Well 10 years later and several years of 'bedding-in' of higher resolution audio formats and I would say if anything there is even less questioning now about investing in an expensive CD player than there was then.

I'm not sure though that parallels can be drawn to closely. If Blu-Ray and HD-DVD both fail to make it as mainstream standards I think this will be more down to a format war frightening away consumers than any lack of ability in the product itself to deliver the goods. I've no doubt that these new high definiton machines will be demonstrably better than DVD to anyone with a decent display and takes image quality seriously. Which is distinctly unlike SACD and DVD-A which has so far failed to prove itself better than CD.

As a slight off-topic point but one worth bearing in mind, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are all about better copy protection, higher quality images are the bait. As I'm not interested in making or receiving illegal copies of disks and I'm prepared to put a disk into a machine rather than play off a server than I think I'll take the benefits and live with the restrictions.

Allan