As the wise Bruce Campbell once said, “if you never had it, people just seem to know.” This statement seems painfully appropriate for the HD-DVD camp, after seeing their big CES 2007 announcements. Someone on the DVDTalk.com forum stated this was the time HD-DVD should have brought their A game, and they didn’t. What I’m wondering if they even had an A game to begin with.

I wrote about how I couldn’t wait for HD-DVD, and I’ve wanted to write a follow-up piece to that for some time. My HD-DVD collection has since grown to the uppper teens, and I’ve even started to rebuy titles which I already owned on standard DVD. I’ve seen the potential of the quality of an HD format, regardless of which one I would adopt. For me, HD-DVD had the lowest adoption cost when comparing the Xbox 360 drive to a standalone player; and at the time, HD-DVD had more movies I wanted to buy than what was available for Blu-Ray. And lastly, cost and availability issues really negated any thought of going toward Blu-Ray right off the bat. It was HD-DVD for me, plain and simple.

After spending months with my Xbox 360 HD-DVD peripheral, I can say I love the quality, I love the format, and it was everything I wanted it to be. Except for the potential. The HD-DVD group made a bunch of announcements about things which were already announced. There were no new studios, no big blows to Blu-Ray. And no reason for anyone to buy an HD-DVD player.

It’s strange to see the parallels of this HD-DVD conference versus Microsoft’s unveiling of the Xbox 360 back in 2005. What they did was announce a new console without any compelling software to back it up. The same thing is happening here, and it’s ironic because Microsoft is behind both. I’m surprised with their lessons learned and subsequently Colossus-killer conference at E3 2006, they couldn’t have put together a better spin with what little they had.

But I don’t think I’ll be leaving one format for another right now, nor will I stop buying HD-DVDs anytime soon. Sure, Blu-Ray has more movies I’d want to buy in 2007, but I’ll probably hold off buying any of them until the recently announced LG combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player becomes more affordable. As my HD-DVD drive is in my gaming room, I’m still in the market for a primary HD player for my main home theater – and having one component that can play both formats is key. There is no doubt more hardware manufacturers will also come out with dual-format drives during 2007, and hopefully the format wars will effectively be dead within twelve months with very little pain for us consumers.

That’s all I really want anyway – one HD format to rule them all.