Agreed. Moving from VHS to DVD was a paradigm shift in home video. Everything was different: quantity (extras), quality (digital sound & picture), convenience (everything we'd gotten used to with CDs), price (better than VHS and laserdisc), etc.

There is no such shift when moving to the HD formats; just incrementally better sound and picture (for folks that have the equipment to appreciate it).

Aside from the format war, there seem to be so many self-made problems that I wonder if folks will put up with them. Something as simple as listening to the audio means that two components have to hand-shake and exchange secret words for security. God forbid your receiver doesn't identify itself as a HDMI repeater, end of conversation and the player doesn't send any video and audio to you receiver. This is already happening with some set top boxes and HDMI equipped receivers.

Depending on which camp you listen to, the video signal may or may not be dumbed down to standard def for the component outputs. Too bad for HD sets without HDMI inputs. If you wait for HDMI 1.3 based gear, so you can transfer Dolby's codecs natively for decoding in the receiver, then you don't get the interactive features that come with decoding the bitstream in the player. However, DTS recently said that they don't want decoding done in the player. (Amazing how that company always manages to shoot itself in the foot.) One of the security measures BluRay proposed to the industry is to have the player connected via phone line.

I could go on but would end up popping a blood vessel. In any case, the whole approach is of treating the customer like the enemy. Much of this happened with the hi-rez audio formats: paranoia prevented a standardized interface from being adopted across the industry. If the industry is sooooo reluctant to give us high resolution video and audio, why do they bother in the first place. Lots of reasons to be pessimestic about the new formats. Personally, I'll wait for some of the dust to settle before investing.