Article
HD-DVD & Blu-ray – No end in sight part 2
So the options available at the moment are all seriously unattractive. It’s forcing High Definition out of many peoples price range, and for the movie, DVD collector it means they either can’t buy certain movie releases, as the studio doesn’t support their player, or they have to pay more money for a Dual or two machine option. This means using cash they could have spent on the discs themselves and to a DVD collector this is not appealing.
The problem with the situation at the moment is that for one format to win through, they require mainstream adoption. To corner this mainstream market, the price needs to be in the right range; if both machines get down to this lower market then we should expect them to still sell in equal measure. They both have an almost equal amount of studio support and the actual difference in disc storage space is negligible. The race is still just too close to call.
Packaging and Design
You may have seen them in the shops with their colour branding in full force, both sides have gone for an obvious image and branding of their format. You would have to be having a bad day to buy the wrong format in the shops with them picking the opposite cool and warm colours of the spectrum to promote their brands.
HD-DVD is in the red corner with their bordering logo applied on all the DVD cases. Their slogan for the disc is ‘The Look and sound of perfect’, well it would be perfect if the discs were a little cheaper, and the cover boxes weren’t covered in the massive HD-DVD Border.
Blu-ray, well Blu-ray is blue, which makes sense doesn’t it, and has a very similar bordering design in that it wraps around the front and side of the box. The Blu-ray logo is quite attractive just not a particularly memorable design, i struggled to remember what it was like while writing this article, and in the end i had to give up and actually check what it looked like.
Out of the two formats I don’t like what they done with any of the disc box covers, their bordering designs while essential to differentiate between the two brands are intrusive, and will be ruining discs cover designs for years to come. Ignoring this, my design choice is split, I like the colour of the Blu-ray discs, just as a personal preference, but I think the HD-DVD logo is much stronger than the Blu-ray. It’s more memorable and it also cashes in on the good image that DVD has as a name.
Check back later for part 3 of this article
or read part 1 of the article here