Toshiba to drop HD DVD?

The Hollywood Reporter is well, reporting that Toshiba will be making an announcement to drop HD DVD, according to their "reliable sources." However:

"Officially, no decision has been made, insists Jodi Sally, vp of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products. "Based on its technological advancements, we continue to believe HD DVD is the best format for consumers, given the value and consistent quality inherent in our player offerings," she said."

The following commentary does not reflect the views of Pop Culture Beast. I don't know what his views are on ths matter.

Now I hate to be political but damnit, why?! Is Sony really throwing it's money around and bribing these companies and studios to go exclusive. They've lost their big chance with the PS3, so perhaps spending more money now to get it all back in 5-10 years will work? Bah! And who are these consumers that have "spoken"? Who are they to have decided that Blu-Ray won? Sure after Warner announced they were going Blu-Ray exclusive Sony's sales increased. That's a no brainer.

Anyway, CNET.com has a great comparison of the two formats. I urge you to go check it out; basically though they are waiting. Me? I am waiting for Sony to get their shit together on their players before I dive right in. Don't know what I am talking about? Well, let me pull some quick facts from that CNET review:

HD DVD:
Upside: Entry-level players are much more affordable than Blu-ray units; tighter specification means that all players have a more consistent feature set; some movies include standard-DVD version on the same disc.

Downside: Studio support limited to just Universal and Paramount, which means no HD DVD movies from Columbia, MGM, Fox, Disney, or Warner (after May 2008); Xbox 360 requires an add-on accessory to play HD DVD discs... Disc capacity 15GB (single layer) 30GB (dual layer) 51GB (prototype triple layer)

Blu-Ray:
Upside: PlayStation 3 plays Blu-ray movies; Blu-ray has support of 70 percent of movie studios; Current Blu-ray discs can hold more data or video than HD DVD counterparts... Disc capacity 25GB (single layer) 50GB (dual layer) 100GB (prototype quad layer).

Downside: Blu-ray players are more expensive than their HD DVD counterparts; support for audio can vary from player to player; different profiles can cause confusion over special feature support. Blu-ray players are not required to have Dolby TrueHD audio decoding (unlike HD DVD), so you'll have to carefully peruse the spec sheet if that's important to you... PS3 as your main Blu-ray player that may chafe home theater fans. It lacks IR support, (which means it won't work with a standard IR-based universal remote), onboard decoding for DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks, and multichannel analog audio outputs, which means you can get high resolution audio only via the HDMI output.

And,
The other major downside is inevitable confusion over Blu-ray profiles. With HD DVD, all of the features of the discs worked on every player--even the initial HD-A1.With Blu-ray, there are many Profile 1.0 players that can't play picture-in-picture commentary, and there will be many Profile 1.1 players that can't play future internet-enabled content...


So there you have it. Ok, so I cut and pasted different parts of the review. Go read the whole thing for yourself :)