Today’s announcement by Toshiba that they will phase out production of HD-DVD players effectively puts an end to the competition between the two hi-definition formats:

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

 Now that it appears the Blu-ray format will capture the market, hopefully the prices on the burners and media will quickly come down.  From a data backup perspective, Blu-ray is a better choice than HD-DVD, since the Blu-ray disks hold 25GB of data per layer.  As the prices drop, Blu-ray will finally become a viable alternative to standard DVD for backing up large amounts of data, and this should help users of larger external hard drives find a faster way to preserve their files.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 @ 9:42 am on the category Blu-ray, Toshiba. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.