Just because the HD-DVD/BluRay thing is settled, doesn't mean that the war is over.  Now I can finally go out and buy the Blu-Ray player.  But wait... I just realized that my 4 year old Sony (supposedly) high end receiver is not so high end anymore.  While my Sony HDTV will accept a single HDMI feed, my receiver has no HDMI interface!  So now I need a new receiver, one that will accept at least 2 HDMI sources (Blu Ray player and Satellite Receiver).  Plus it has to up convert my SD (480i) signals to 1080p.

Is there no end!!!!

Tell me about it. To support BluRay, I will need to replace my current HDTV or purchase a $200 adapter plus a potential additional $200 to overcome a known issue in my brand of HDTV. So that's $200 to $400 before I buy even buy a player.

I have a 6 or 7 year old HDTV that does not have HDMI so I use the component connection from my BlueRay player.  The picture looks very good.  Is there a difference in picture quality to the human eye (HDMI vs component) and do you know technically what the difference might be?

Having heard an industry expert on BBC news today at lunchtime, his statement was that there is little perceptive difference between SD and HD unless you are using an HD tv over 42". In UK, sales of Blu-ray have outnumbered sales of HD DVD by a ratio of over 4:1, but that there is a very low base rate of sales - nobody seems to be interested!

Given that we have only one broadcaster who outputs HD (Sky), BBC (state broadcaster) will not go fully live until 2010, channel 4 has only started to output HD (and all of these use Sky to output), it would appear that there is little interest in HD recording or viewing.

I did a quick Google for availability and prices of Blu-ray and HD DVD players and the prices were c.£200 and c.£50 ($400 and $100), so we are not talking 'life changing investments' here.

In the days of the Wild West, they used to say 'pioneers get arrows in their backs', and so it has transpired if you chose the wrong horse - but hey, punters lose loads of money every day for backing the wrong horse!

Little perceptive difference between DVD and Blu? Maybe on the cheapest plasma...
I now output all the performances I tape on both, the differences are so substancial.
The way I have experienced, 1080i will output over the component jacks, 1080p needs the HDMI.

Here's our old friend Tim Wilson's take:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/wilson_tim/blu-ray.php