HD DVD Dead

Well, fine, but since Blu-ray (sounds like a crunk act) is synonymous with Sony, I'm not pleased. Don't own either, but I don't trust Sony unlike this bonehead they found in Best Buy.

"Blu-ray won. It's fantastic and I trust Sony," said one customer who was browsing the DVD player aisles at the Best Buy Co Inc store on New York's Fifth Avenue.

Sony. Trust. Let me recount some Sony antics...

• Betamax vs VHS
• ATRAC vs MP3
• Blu-ray vs HD-DVD
• Memory Sticks vs Compact Flash, SD, etc etc.
• Mini-disc vs CD/MP3 (or the small diameter CD's but I don't recall the time frame on those)
• the UMD vs DVD again or whatever other format. Would have worked if they had started a DVD/UMD twinpack IMHO at first.
• Trinitron. Looked great. Do try to ignore those wires.
• And the biggy for 'trust' issues: The infamous Sony rootkit

What Sony does is try to introduce proprietary stuff so they can make royalties. Fine, company makes money.

You might love Sony but they'll never love you. I'd trust Apple more. At least they realized that standards are the way to go. They even finally embraced Intel/PC hardware. (Sure some stuff is Apple proprietary but not NEARLY to the degree Sony is.)

Sony products I've owned that didn't live up:

• the original PSP: easy to crack the screen, easy to scratch, fragile is the sum word. Now, it was a cool piece or hardware and I liked it. See 'UMD' above. Sold it.
  
• DRX-800UL Firewire external drive. Burnt a lot of coasters through the Finder until I bought Toast 8. Might be Apple's fault but I don't trust the drive since it's the first one I've had any sort of trouble with burning coasters. Got it cheap and it works with Toast which I got cheap for other reasons. It's a draw.
  
• SVR-2000 TiVo. Damn hard to find a 3rd party remote for due to the Sony differences. Guess what, a Sony universal worked. $70. Selling or giving it away. Finally found a cheap $10 one. Think it was a Sony too.
  

Sony makes some good stuff, but *I* find the lower end stuff to be not living up to the high end build quality. It's like it's two separate companies sometimes.

Bleah.