I have been watching this format "war" lunacy from afar while still enjoying the mature technology from a couple of good standard DVD players in my home. We have enough hi def TV's and satellite programming in my house that if I want an eye popping thrill, I can watch the Learning Channel or football game. I actually feel that SD DVD is good enough, most of the better SD transfers have a HD "look" anyway and the lack of perfection gives DVD's a cinematic quality on a large home screen in my opinion. Further, because I don't watch the same movies over and over and my local Blockbuster doesn't rent HD movies, the only reason for me to want to regress from a speedy and refined DVD player to a quirky one with no promise of a future would be if these things were cheap enough.
Hence the under $100 A2, I figure the A2 is cheap enough to throw it in a second system, see what the 5 free DVDs look like and not sweat out the slower load times and general lack of features that I have become accustomed to like disc memory and zoom.
So I strolled into my local Walmart at 10AM and passed a guy with one of these babies under each arm on the way to the register, I said to myself "here we go" as I headed back to electronics where they informed that their full pallet was gone. As I was asking one of the clerks to call another store, I noticed an A2 sitting behind the register and asked if they would sell it, the clerk handed it to me.
So now I have somewhat of a vested interest in this "war". However, I am generally put off by the greed of the manufacturers to already be 2 or 3 generations deep on these things with each generation being rife with its' share of problems. I mean really, pick any thread that is 20 pages long or so on Bluray or HD DVD and jump in randomly and start reading, you will no doubt be reading more about how the player doesn't do what is supposed to do vs. how wonderful it is.
It seems like the HD DVD crowd is the happiest because all the issues seem bearable when the cash outlay is fairly reasonable, count me in on this crowd.
