I hope to, sooner than later, to own a good sized LCD or plasma TV and BR player. I never made the leap to 5.1 for my main system (the one I do own is being used for my kids' gaming). So, I'm kinda discouraged by what I'm reading. Sir T's statement that filmbuffs are keeping BD sales respectable even during a recession, is prolly true. I haven't seen any numbers, but its usually true about any new technology, as its usually the audiophiles and videophiles that make new tech viable and attractive to new investers which in turn increases production and eventually drives prices down on hardware and software.

It was in the late '90s that I remember DVD taking off and by '00, DVD accounted for about half of the rentals one would see at video stores. The DVD was a welcomed new format as most people were already wearing out their second or third copy VHS cassettes because the cheaper players stretched the hell out of the video tape. Good riddance to VHS.

Then maybe just a couple of years after nearly everyone I knew had changed over to DVD, we start hearing about hi-def TV and HD-DVD, (and DVD-A, and SACD etc, etc) and just a few years after that, we hear about BluRay... I know that to audiophiles and videophiles 10-12 years between video format changes is a lifetime, but it still seems like yesterday for a lot of average joes that DVD came out. People love convenience and they love 'easy', How is BD to take off if titles, old and new, are slow to hit the shelves?

As for quality, thats gonna mean different things to different people. One person's "stark realism" is another person's "cellophane sheen". I saw The Toothfairy on BD, and while some said it "looks 3-D", I found some scenes suffered from a sort of glaze. But of course my lack of enthusiasm was more to do with the fact I had sit through 10 or 15 minutes of a movie I wouldn't own if it came with a free TV. I'd rather watch a low-res movie I liked than a bad movie in the latest technology.

As of last week, the only video rental chain in our fairly sizable town, Hollywood Video, has gone 'TU', leaving only a handful of RedBoxes to rent from, as well as Netflix and On-Demand. My wife loves not having to go to a physical store and I love not getting a phone call from the video store about the stack of overdue DVDs under the den couch.

I'm not saying there's no hope for a BD player in my family's future, but its gonna take something spectacular, like a BD release of I Love Lucy, Elvis in 3-D or something like that. Luckily, I do not have a ton of DVDs to replace. My wife was mesmerized by Flushed Away on a plasma TV last weekend. I want to ditch cable TV this fall (two kids in highschool now) and just start buying titles, on BD, price and availability permitting, and an absence of garbage from cable might advance that cause. But yeah, a recession is a bad time to introduce a new video format to a culture already pressed for time and money.