Re-Writable Blu-Ray discs. Sweet. I figured they were coming, but I haven't heard anything about them yet. "Creative potential for home-movie entertainment." Haha. I like that. Now if they could only get "creative" with the TV series release titles they've been coming out with. I swear they're not putting any budget money into those.

(Getting off-topic...) I think it's absolutely pathetic when you start shipping a TV series in multi-slim cases in a cardboard box, and with no inside slip cover to show you individual chapters. No money, no effort, quick buck, and far from what I consider professional-grade.

(Slightly back on topic:)
This goes to show you that you can't say the movie industry has never been given options. Go Blu-Ray!

Yeah, I'm getting kind of "itchy" for the BluRay discs to go mainstream myself, SG.

You can bet, both the players and in particular the discs, are going to be damned pricey at first. And of course, be prepared to be heavily gouged by Hollywood as well.

Still...... we won't make it to affordable discs and players until sometime after all the "early adoption" stuff is out of the way. Frankly, I won't be the first on my block to adopt the new system like I did with DVD (I paid $1500 for my first DVD player which had less capability than today's $100 players), and the $20 blank discs now cost .50c. ( !!! )

And of course, we're ALL going to have to run out and buy those new, expensive 16:9 TV sets now....... [sigh]

I'll be pouring through these AfterDawn pages I can tell you just as soon as this stuff hits the retail shelves.

<< Blu-Ray "rippers" anyone? >> That's certainly going to take a while ! Perhaps we could all start taking up an advance collection for Jon Johannsen ? <sp>.

And don't hesitate to pick up on your favourite TV shows on regular DVD *right now* if you can find them, SG. All of our most valued TV shows - the ones we have watched and loved for years and years, were never filmed/taped in Hi-Def anyway. You will not lose *anything* in terms of video quality by purchasing them on standard DVD. All that BluRay can do for us here, would be to allow us to put a whole lot MORE content (shows) on each disc, but the video quality would be the same.

I'd go easy on new (standard) dvd *movie* purchases though. What do you want to bet that many (most?) of today's releases will be re-re-re-re-issued in the new Hi-Def format?

Interesting times ahead !