Comments on: Trade HD DVDs for Blu-rays with Warner's Red2Blu program

Warner's new Red2Blu program is letting customers trade in HD DVDs for Blu-ray versions of the same movie, for a small fee plus shipping and handling.

[ducttape36]

i bought an hd-dvd/blu ray player because a lot of the hd-dvd titles i wanted arent available for bluray. also, you can buy hd-dvd for dirt cheap now on ebay. I wont be trading them in ever.

[ucb2007]

This is a great opportunity to get some blu-rays for cheap. You can get some HD DVDs on Amazon for like $3 and then trade them in for $5. That's $8 plus the $7 for shipping for your whole order and your gotten a blu-ray for $8-$9. Not bad. Just a way to keep a little of the money they gouge for those $30 blu-rays.

[pmh1939]

I like both formats and will keep my HD discs. In my opinion, the HD players provide a more natural video and audio playback. Overall, I think they do a superior job of SD upscaling.

I do have one new combination that I find produces really outstanding video and audio - the Sharp 42" 85 Series TV/Sharp 21 BlueRay player combination. These components produce one of the finest synergies I have experienced in my 60 years of live music performance, audio/video fun, retailing, component evalatuion and magazine article writing. As Wendy's spokesperson might say - "It's way better" than anything else at its pricepoint.

Information I get from CNET is worthwhile. Good Job!

[downside1983]

I would just like to point out one particular fact for the discussion. blu-ray for one has much more future capabilities. For one it holds up to 25 gigs WAAAY over a standard HD-DVD and china has advised that they predict they can eventually get a blue disk with as much as 100 gigs of information on it. What does this mean to you? It means more content on each disk of bonus features and game capabilities.

My prediction is that it will become the new CD burner or DVD burner. I believe in the future the same disk that used to hold 4.7 gigs will be replaced with a blue-ray disk that can hold over 25 gigs. The blue ray drives for PC's are already coming down to around $150...or if you shop for around and look in the right places $100.

Now is this reality yet? NO! of course not! but look at the history. When dvd players came out...in about the 5 years following we started using them as storage for our pc's...purely from their storage capabilities. It became the standard drive. I believe that this is part of why blu-ray won.

[cgarrett]

Too bad nobody's offering trade-ups for plain old DVD's. I'd go out and buy a Blu-Ray player for that reason alone. For now, I can't imagine spending $200 for a player when I can't afford the content. It's all still at $30 a disc.

I've been very happy with my HD DVD player and continue to buy movies at substantially discounted prices. I am avid movie buff and I've found a gold mine of older movies at usually $5 versus the $25 prices I see for Blu Ray. Like everyone else, I've adopted Blu Ray, but have no plans to abandon my HD DVD player either, which also doubles as my standard DVD player. I bought my HD DVD player for only $97 during a black Friday sale, so I don't feel I've got a lot of money into the format and besides the prices for disks are better than any standard definition movie you can buy and of course the picture is superb, especially if you have a projection system with a large screen. I always believed both formats could have co-existed for years together, but I can see why retailers and studios wanted a winner. I suspect the HD DVD disks will be available for years to come through resellers and Ebay, etc.

[techie4234]

I hate to break it to anyone but blu-ray will never become mainstream. DVDs were a major step forwards compared to vhs tapes, no rewinding can skip scenes major quality upgrade etc. Also back then portable hds were pretty much non-exsistant so the only way to backup data was with cds, or to give a file to a friend was with cds. Now of days the internet will allow transfers of files that are gigabytes big. On top of that if you need to back-up your computer, no problem for 50 dollars you can get a portable hd. Now just imagine, fiber is becoming more prevalent, in 5ish years a significant portion of the population will have internet that is at least 20mb/s fast. That is more than enough to get pretty decent hd quality video streamed to your tv. So where is the market for blu-ray, well its the same market as audio dvds and the others, soon it will die because only the quality obsessed will get it. The only way for it to survive is to sell blu-rays at around 10-20 dollars. I honestly believe Microsoft released hd-dvd just to cripple sony enough to allow for internet streamed video to take off.

[dave1smith]

The titles you can trade for are quite limited. I have 9 HD DVDs and only 2 of them were available for trade-in, unfortunately.

[jammit20]

No plans to upgrade discs, HD DVD player works, why upgrade for more cash ? Strange how people love to spend for no reason. Ok, your HD-DVD player bit the dust, maybe then I would upgrade. Happy with HD-DVD and the up convert of DVD. I'll wait another year or so until good blu's are cheaper or fogotton due to streaming.