That wait-and-see attitude towards HD purchases goes well beyond this week’s Best Buy survey on HD sets. It’s not what HD proponents and manufacturers will want to hear, but the word of advice in some widely circulated non-technical publications continues to be one of caution when it comes to consumers and the next generation of DVDs.
As far as HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc players (and disc titles in both incompatible formats), various industry observers contacted recently by The Wall Street Journal continue to advise consumers to “wait until the dust settles.”
Likening the next-gen DVD battle to “the plot of the latest blockbuster movie,” the trade group Home Theater Specialists of America says only one format will survive and it’s still a gamble to choose which side may be victorious, according to the Journal.
As for purchasing a new HD set, the advice is “wait one year”—citing as one reason the observation that HD content has not yet caught up with the latest technology that has been incorporated in very new sets, meaning that buyers would not be getting all they might get a year from now.
Yet if this logic of wait-and-see sounds like a vicious cycle that never ends, at least one reason cited to buy HD equipment now is the fact that price points have dropped dramatically in the past couple of years, with no guarantees that the trend will necessarily continue, at least at its current rate.
