[Platinum Chris]

Should be a good fight, un-needed fight.

M$ & Hitachi/Toshiba vs. Sony

The war started when both sides couldn't agree on certain formats when writing and reading to the disks.

Both use the same 'Blue Laser' to read the DVD's, but because Blu-Ray reads on a tigher circle, one standard player cannot play both. This allows Blu-Ray to have a much higher storage capacity but are more expensive to make. (there's more techy stuff here that doesn't matter to teh avg. person)

Lost?

Blu-Ray is more expensive to make, and has a much larger capacity per disc than HD-DVD. The quality on both for movies is the same.

Its really unfair to us consumers that we have to be a party to this format war. I'm not planning to invest any $ in either format as DVD's on my Plasma thru component look good enough for me.

As for the leader, I'd say Blu-Ray has a very good lead right now, backed by the PS3 and many Movie studios signed to the format as well as computer makers.