Damn,I love it when all the egotistical,self agrandizing,early adopting techo-idiots get burnt on high dollar door stops.
It couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people.Wear it in bad health,chump!!!HAHAHAHAHAHA

Personally, i'm just glad it's over. I haven't bought any, and now i'll just have the prices to be right for me... Maybe a Blu-Ray burner on my computer of 2010? 2011?

Blu Ray recordable drives are available now for PCs. They cost about $550, which is a great price, and about $15 for a BD-R.

I am going to go out and buy more cheap HD_DVD Movies. Also I don' beleive the statement that you won't be able to get the player repaired. With a million players sold someone I find it hard to beleive nobody wants to make money fixing them. As far a bluray is concerned, I won't buy a player for another year or so until the prices drop to a reasonable player and they get all the features that HD-DVD players have now

Since I got my HD-A1 for about $30.00 (including 2 movies) I don't really care that much. (Thank you Sears). I can watch the movies that are HD-DVD only (for now) & may pick-up some cheap disks as they get blown out. Also got a Sony BDP-S1 (Sears again, $100) so I'm all set with the winner too.

Since the HD-DVD was less than half the price of the Blu-Ray, and up-converts all of my old DVD's to a very high quality, as well as the regular DVD's that I rent, it still has a good value for me. I will not be purchasing a Blu-Ray play and/or recorder for at least a year. I don't purchase many movies, just rent, so not such a big deal.

Ship your working HD players to me

It is unfortunate that part of equation to get the blu-Ray player prices down is now gone. This technolgy is for high end users who, for, the most part, don't mind spending a littl more money for high end. I hope Sony has not sacrificed quality on their players by installing poor quality player mechanisms like they did on some of their Playstations. i wonder what Toshiba will do on their slot load TVs for an HD player now?

I don't foresee Blu-Ray lasting particularly long either. Why bother running out to the store to pick up a DVD when you can sit on your butt at home and download whatever content you want to your TV?

I just purchased my HD DVD Player, 2 weeks ago, just before Toshiba "packed its bags" on their HD Player. I originally bought it for $179 but just visited where I bought it from and TOMORROW the price goes down to $129. I'll be returning there to get my $50 in a refund, which makes the package a steal of a deal. It is the best Upconversion Player that I've been able to find and came with 2 HD DVDs in box and I'm now sending my coupon for my other FREE 5 HD DVDs. Considering the price of the DVDs, I guess the player is just icing on the cake. On a tight budget, Blu-Ray isn't about to happen.

Maybe I'm looking a little too far into the future, but I see all movies (and other entertainment programming) being provided "on demand" by satellite, cable, IPTV, etc.. (I think going to the video store is on its way into the history books already, frankly.)
And so, I tend to look at the technology of laser-written discs simply as storage media. When looking at storage devices, I tend to look at capacity as the main consideration.. and if I am not mistaken, Blu Ray holds 20GBs more.
The discs last only so long, the devices last only so many hours..and the technology only so many years. Laser-written discs will, someday, be the floppies of today. So use what you have..till the wheels fall off.

What about DVD recorders as against players--Are they also redundant??

The way I see it, laser-written discs will be a form of (recordable) storage for a little while longer, but they will be completely phased out and replaced with a form of flash memory (solid-state hard drives).
Whether you're looking at camcorders, TiVo-type recorders, or data backup..flash is going to win out. It reads/writes faster, and is very nearly as portable.
The real change will be when the idea of "owning" a movie becomes obsolete, because it is always available "on demand" (and I don't mean pay-per-view).

HD-DVD was the most cost effective option for eveybody for a transitional period of time. But Sony managed to screw it up. Too bad (for Sony) Bluray is already obsolete, a living fossil.

Let me guess: Like Sony's BetaMax that lost out to the inferior VHS format, Toshiba's HD DVD was not only less expensive but probably better designed?

While my friend was replacing her $2,000+ collection of VHS tapes in favor of DVDs about seven years ago she wasn't exactly an early adopter of the DVD format. Now we hear that Blu-ray is going to overtake standard DVDs. I'm sure glad I didn't invest much money buying movies. I have a pathetically small movie collection and given how soon DVDs of any kind will be obsolete -- they'll probably be stored on the equivalent of an SD memory chip in a few years requiring "players" with fewer moving parts -- it's just as well.

Technology isn't the enemy here, but the disorganized and costly way in which it is released is. The reality is that manufacturer "innovations" end up being showcased as early as 10 years in advance in magazines such as Popular Science, and yet while tech R&D staff see the writing on the wall their marketing divisions continue to manufacture yesterday's goods knowing full well, I suspect, that it will result in consumers needing or wanting to upgrade in short order out of fear of becoming a backward holdout with the equivalent of 8-track gear.

So here's my question: Why don't tech manufacturers work with government agencies and/or qualifying members of the public -- the audio/AV nuts and the writers for their magazines -- to test new technology on a limited release loan/lease basis (like the car companies did with the first electric vehicles)? When these A/V "beta testers" vote or otherwise reach a simple majority agreement on the format that best merits a complete "roll out", only then does it hit the retail shelves. If the technology weren't changing so fast and at such great expense -- meaning we're lucky if we get 5 years out of anything vs. earlier generations who enjoyed 20-40 years out of their TVs and tube radios -- I wouldn't advocate such a radical idea. But with tech of all manner hitting retail shelves faster than s*** can hit a fan, something needs to be done to reign in the profiteirs who know they are selling us yesterday's technology before it even comes off the production lines.

Consumers don't want to be stuck with obsolete gear, yet when uninformed consumers decide based, all too often, upon the minimum-wage, minimal-knowledge recommendations of a Best Buy or Circuit City employee, an inferior product has just as much opportunity to win out as a better designed technology. Our Founding Father's had pretty much the same concern but for survival-of-the-Republic reasons. A pure democracy would rest on a sometimes uneducated and disinterested voter, which is one reason why the Founders put in place the Electoral College. Likewise, if tech companies and more qualified AV geek "beta testers" do not want to do the deciding behind the scenes in search of a standardized format, why not, at least, voluntarily adopt product packaging warning labels to the effect that the item in question is part of a "non standardized format" (with details to follow in the owner's guide)? Or perhaps, like the food companies that recently began to imprint intelligible "best by dates" on canned foods, tech companies should begin to affix an "anticipated product life" date on their packaging? That way if a consumer wants to be an "early adopter" of a product that may be obsolete in 2 years or less, he or she will do so with full understanding at the point of sale -- no tedious research sessions on the Internet required.

If manufacturers refuse to voluntarily adopt an informative marketing approach of some sort, perhaps it is time for regulators to compell the manufacturers to spend a bit more time deciding upon an industry standard (format). You wouldn't necessarily have to make it a law about marketing only "standardized" goods. You could simply create a financial disencentive for these tech companies to deny buyers the knowledge that a product's life may be short lived. One way of providing the proper incentive to inform consumers of the risk they are taking up front would be to require manufacturers whose products become obsolete in less than three years to provide coupons or credits to registered owners who end up holding the bag for a failed format. It could even be implemented on a teired basis: For example, if you bought a Toshiba HD DVD last year, your credit toward a substitute replacement technology might be 30 percent, whereas if you bought the technology three years ago you might only be eligible for a 10 percent coupon/credit toward the purchase of an equivalent replacement product. This approach would provide modest consolation to unsuspecting consumers, while simultaneously providing an incentive for tech companies not to rush products to production that have a strong likihood of failing (for no other reason, perhaps, than engineering profit spikes before it does).

Although I've thrown out a lot of ideas, the specifics of how the problem should be handled are beyond my expertise. But here's one thing I do know: With the pace at which technology changes, something has to be done to reign in all the sucking sounds as our pocketbooks are drained.

Throwing out products and letting the market decide is a recipe not only for confusion, but consumer debt. Lord knows we really and truly NEED all these gadgets and the money otherwise destined toward retirement funds, credit card repayments or our kids' college funds that we continually are tempted to spend or reserve to avoid slipping the techno Dark Age. How many times, even in the A/V media, does anyone acknowledge, for example, that consumer product companies have up to a 10-year product development cycle? What does this mean in plain English? It means that a computer that runs two processors at 5 gigahertz may have hit the drawing board in 1998 even though you might not see it on store shelves until 2012. As consumers, we really need to wise up to the scam of releasing lower end products, which are actually 5-10 years in the pipeline before we even buy the "new" gear, with full knowledge and intent to leave us itching for the next big thing the following year. Why not bring out the best technology companies are capable of producing right now rather than making us suffer through the stuff that hit the pages of Popular Science circa 1990?