My personal opinion is that right now is not a good time to buy into Blu-ray, unless you are a gamer and you want a PS3. Why? The high cost of players ($500 minimum) and the yet to be finalized or mandatory support of the final BD-J spec in players. Blu-ray players manufactured after October of this year will be mandated to support ALL BD-J features and use a minimum set of components. Once Blu-ray players drop in price and they support all BD-J functionality, I will look at picking one up.

The fact that Blu-ray is already working on 8x to 12x recordable media while HD DVD is stalled at 1x is one issue.

The fact that Toshiba, NEC and Buffalo are the only companies making HD DVD transports while NEC, Pioneer, Lite-On, BenQ, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technologies (TSST) and others are are making Blu-ray transports is another issue.

The fact that Blu-ray is accelerating their economy of scale faster is another – Blu-ray has over 10 million players in the wild and HD DVD is in the hundreds of thousands. Blu-ray also has tens of millions of software discs in the wild while HD DVD is still in the hundreds of thousands.

The fact that Blu-ray has quite a bit more CE manufactures behind it than HD DVD is another point (and virtually 100% of the PC industry).

The fact that Blu-ray also has the software advantage with the majority of the Hollywood studios supporting it.

And lastly, the fact that Blu-ray software sales are over 25% higher on a weekly basis at minimum is the largest point made.

But if you are an enthusiast, I say right now is a good time to do both if you can afford it because then you get all the movies you want in high-def. So there’s that.

Now that doesn’t mean that this won’t change in the future. In fact, it will almost certainly change as additional Blu-ray DRM protections are released on the market (such as BD+).

With all of that said, I do enjoy supporting the format (HD DVD) with an overall lower DRM footprint. But I didn’t want to make this article a Blu-ray VS HD DVD piece.