kewl!!!

What do you mean "kewl"? This sucks. OK, so the competition might help frive prices down, but imagine this: You spend 200 dollars on a drive from one of the technology-camps. Then, a year later the other technology takes over and your stuck with a drive you can´t use since no one makes discs for the "old" technolgy.

I can already see the situation where DVD formats haven't cleared the standard yet and there are two blue-laser disc formats available. Then you have to pick which writer you buy:

Combo DVD-R/W - Blu-Ray drive
Combo DVD+R/W - NEC/Toshiba drive
Combo DVD-R/W - NEC/Toshiba drive
Combo DVD+R/W - Blu-Ray drive

Surely guys, now the decision is made, we Joe public will decide. If Blu-Ray uses a 0.1mm cover layer and if it can store upto 27GB of data per side, then it may well be the better of the two tech. systems. The earlier this knowledge is made known to us "Joe Publics" The greater the chances are of the best system becomming the standard. Won learns from history that the first on the market may well sweep the best away. I am old enough to remember the dezaster of VHS and Betamax!

I'm not so sure about the public's ability to choose the format -- or actually, yes, public WILL choose the format, but meanwhile there are millions of people who bought "the wrong one" and will suffer. That wont be the case with current DVD recordable war, because both formats can be read with each other's drives and with existing DVD players, but as these two blue-laser technologies are so different, there's a good change that these will be identical to the Beta/VHS war, where players weren't compatible with each other.

This is a no brainer, I will always go with the technology that offers me the most bang for my dollars and the most storage. There are nine big consumer companies behind the Blu-Ray technology, that's a lot of muscle. Considering that Toshiba is one of the core groups behind the DVD Forum, the Blu-Ray Consortium probably wanted to put pressure on the DVD Forum to look at technology over favoring one of its members. I want to go with the best technology. Just from the little bit of information given, Blu-Ray seems to be on the leading edge. It will probably be like the -R/RW and +R/RW. The +R/RW is actually closer to the DVD Forum specs for what DVD should be. I would not be surprised if Blu-Ray did the same.