Womble used our news submit to tell us
that he spotted an excelent article about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD on Tom's Hardware
(TH) site. CD Freaks already compared these two
formats a while ago, but you might be
interested in reading this article because it offers a retrospective of the DVD
road plus Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)
and Fluorescent Multilayer Disc
(FMD) reviews. Both articles - CD Freaks and Tom's Hardware
- provide a wealth of information, althought TH didn't get to any
conclusion.
consumer electronics market has traditionally been a little
slower at imposing planned obsolescence on its customers than the
computing industry, but it violated that rule with the work on the
next-generation DVD. Before DVD even hit the market in 1997, consumer
electronics manufacturers were already at work on the next iteration of
the standard.
Word about
these new technologies began to trickle out in early 2002, with demo units
making their debut at the January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Sony made a great deal of noise with its Blu-ray format and had
considerable support from other OEMs. Toshiba and NEC seemed like a dark
horse with their Advanced Optical Disc (AOD). Given this, a lot of people
were shocked in 2003 when the DVD Forum, the trade association that
shepherded the DVD format from spec to market, adopted AOD as the
official, Forum-endorsed next-generation format. It was felt that Sony's
Blu-ray had the edge in every way, but the Forum picked AOD, which was
renamed HD-DVD.
There's a lot
of confusion surrounding the two formats, which, as the DVD editor for
IGN, I experienced almost from day one. Hopefully, this article will help
shed a little light on what's going on in both camps. It's not easy to
fully explain everything, since some specs have not yet been settled upon,
or are stable but not thoroughly documented. I expect to revisit this
story more than a few times as things fall into place, standards are
adopted and the whole situation shakes
out.
You can read the entire article
here.
For questions and answer, search in our our
Satellite, HD-TV, Blu-ray and HD-DVD Forum.
Source: Tom's Hardware
