OTHER TECH

Format War Is Hell

After all the hype and hoopla over the last year or so about hi-def discs, I finally got to see a Toshiba HD DVD player for a couple of hours on both a 50-inch Pioneer plasma TV and a 72-inch Toshiba DLP set. The image on the supplied demo disc and The Last Samurai was incrementally better than a first-class upconversion of a high-quality standard DVD. The resolution, color saturation, contrast, and similar attributes were a little better than on a DVD, but not a whole lot. (The Toshiba's own upconversion circuitry does a superb job with standard DVDs, by the way.)

If the price for HD DVD players remains at $500 and the disks are $25, I'm afraid we'll have another D-VHS on our hands - a "niche" product. So far, this is much ado about nothing much. Good, but very disappointing. MILT R. SMITH LOS ANGELES, CA

Does anybody - besides the obvious executives, promoters, marketers, and the like - really care about the "battle" between Blu-ray and HD DVD? These discs will be history in a very short time, replaced by high-speed Internet, high-capacity storage devices, downloadable content, and other alternatives.

I've been a fan of movies from Beta and VHS through laserdisc and DVDs, and the next step won't be through discs of any kind. By the time prices become reasonable for high-def discs and players, I'll be able to download an HD version of King Kong and feed it to my projector to watch while enjoying my big $1 bag of microwave popcorn. If Sony, Toshiba, and their studio supporters can't understand that dynamic, I won't lose sleep over it or wait for them to figure it out - and neither will anybody else. DAVID N. CHAMBERLIN RAMONA, CA