CORP TALK: Japan’s Toshiba Corporation will be entering the Blu-ray Disc market, after more than a year of abandoning the HD-DVD format market. According to an AFP report here, the company will be launching Blu-ray products as soon as this year, encouraged by the rapid growth and demand for the format in Japan.

Navin Danapal, Technical Editor, HWM Malaysia

Navin (HWM MY): If this doesn’t seal the next-gen DVD war then nothing else will. Toshiba was the biggest advocate for the rival HD-DVD format going against Sony’s Blu-ray Disc (BD) format in the past few years.

Over time we began to see Sony’s BD standard taking up the storm while Toshiba’s HD-DVD began to wither in support.

However, to see Toshiba themselves entering their rival’s market is ultimately the nail-in-the-coffin for the HD-DVD format, as there were some rumours that the Japanese are not known to take kindly to defeat, and that Toshiba won’t back down from their HD-DVD war. Now with this entry, it’s clear the days of HD-DVD is over for good.

In fact, it doesn’t take much to know that HD-DVD will lose the war compared to BD for a simple technical fact that BD stores more than HD-DVD.

When you consider that the next-gen DVD format is meant to replace the DVD, obviously we need something that can store as much as possible to have a sufficient lifespan to last till the next-gen replacement comes along. In the least, a blue LASER is far more attractive to consumers (and easier to market) than the same red LASER used in CDs and DVDs. HD-DVD was doomed from the start and it was a sheer waste of time to even consider trying to win this war.

For the early adopters of HD-DVD, their days are numbered for players which support their HD-DVD collection. It’s probably best for them to relegate it to the Hall of Fame together with past technology failures like Sony’s Betamax during the VHS war many years ago.

Now can we all move on and adopt the BD standard as the DVD replacement already? Coming up next, the Holographic media storage wars which will loom in the not so distant future.