Throughout the year 2007, it was a war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and the consumers had been put off from buying high definition DVD players because one just do not want to buy the Betamax of the twenty-first century, whatever that is. Then came 2008. On Jan 4 Warner Bros, a supporter of HD-DVD, announced that it will drop HD-DVD in favour of Blu-Ray, and the whole thing just collapsed within two month. By Feb 19, even Toshiba announced its abandonment from HD-DVD, together with Microsoft dropping the HD-DVD support for Xbox 360.

Yes. Blu-Ray won the format war. The very first for Sony?

Then we see a flood of HD-DVD related “bargains” appear on the Internet, and many of them got posted on OzBargain.

• Xbox 360 HD DVD Player — $44 from DVDCrave $47 from dStore

• HD-DVD Movies — there are bargains everywhere

You can pretty much grab a HD DVD player + a couple of great movies for under $100 — something totally unimaginable last year. Now the question is, are they really bargains consider HD-DVD is a dying format?

Yes and no. You don’t get this kind of gadget fire-sale very often, and I am pretty sure those HD-DVDs will be splendours on your 1080p LCD TV. However, this is indeed a dead technology so you probably won’t be able to buy any more HD-DVDs in the future. Moreover, what happen if the player breaks? Then you can’t watch the HD-DVDs that you have purchased unless you start hunting for a working machine on eBay.

And believe it or not, obsolete players are actually expensive on eBay. Search Betamax on eBay reveals many expensive 25-year-old betamax players, and they can fetch that price because someone 25 years ago did not want to follow the trend and bought heaps of videos on Betamax…

Personally I won’t spend a cent on HD-DVD (althugh I voted +1 on all those HD-DVD deals). I don’t even have a proper TV…