Blu-ray Beating HD-DVD in High-Def Format Battle
The high definition disc format war wages on. Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD trading blows yet again by trading regular press releases tauting the domination of their respective format. Last month Sony was on the receiving end with stats showing that HD-DVD sales were gaining momentum faster than Blu-ray, but now it's Sony's turn to gloat, with the company's format racking up twice the sales of HD-DVD over the first six months of the year. Between January 1st and June 31st, 1.6 million Blu-ray discs were sold compared to 795,000 HD-DVDs. It's unclear whether the freebie Blu-ray discs Sony is giving away with PS3s are included in this figure, but even if so it looks like Blu-ray has some solid momentum. High-def sales of '300' have shown similar stats: 190,000 Blu-ray discs of the movie were sold compared to 97,000 on HD-DVD.
Overall, though, HD-DVD isn't far behind, selling 1.5 million discs total compared to 2.2 for Blu-ray. And, given that sales for plain 'ol DVDs number in the billions every year, it looks like this war has a long, long way to go before either format can claim supremacy.
So, does this mean you have to make a choice in the high-def format war? Not really, particulary since LG already offers a hybrid disc player and a hybrid drive for your computer that play both formats (and, Samsung will release its own hybrid Blu-ray/HD-DVD player later this year).
From BetaNews
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