The big news of the last couple weeks (at least in the consumer electronics realm) has been the final and decisive victory of the Blu-Ray high-definition media format over competitor HD-DVD. It happened much more quickly than anyone anticipated (myself included, having written about it less than two months ago). The beginning of the last chapter in HD-DVD’s life was in the first week of January 2008, when Warner — which had been dual-format — announced they were going to be releasing on Blu-Ray exclusively in the future. At the time, I (and most people) concluded that the format war was pretty much over, since Warner was such a huge studio, and the only remaining question was how long Toshiba would let HD-DVD suffer. I personally gave them 18 months; the format war has dragged on for years already, and I didn’t think big companies would move much faster than that. A lot of other tech bloggers gave HD-DVD about six to eight months, at the short end. As it turns out, it took all of six weeks.

With the majority of studios on the Blu side, HD-DVD was already down for the count as 2008 started, and then it got repeatedly kicked in the face as Wal-Mart, Netflix, and Best Buy all announced that they would discontinue HD-DVD sales/rentals (BlockBuster had already done the same last summer). So although the end was inevitable, the speed with which Toshiba admitted defeat was not — but it was admirable. From a purely business standpoint, it makes a ton of sense, because the longer they held on the more money they would lose. No one ever said, however, that big companies always do things that make sense.

So, the format war is over! Blu-Ray has won, we now know what will replace DVD, and we can all run out and start buying Blu-Ray players without fearing they’ll be obsolete before Christmas, right? Not exactly.

The biggest issue is this: current Blu-Ray players are crap. Unless you buy a Sony PlayStation3, I would stay far away from this generation of players. They are buggy, and many can’t even play normal DVDs very well. One Samsung model I read a review for even puts a black box around your plain DVDs — not black bars on the side, but a black box, essentially cheating you out of about 25% of that HDTV you paid for. Firmware updates are sometimes required for the players to be compatible with the latest Blu-Ray movies (since the spec is still evolving slightly), and even then some of them won’t support the full range of Blu-Ray features due out this year. Without boring you with the details, let me tell you what is a pretty safe assumption: by the end of this year, the Blu-Ray spec will be more or less where it’s going to stay, and there will be better, cheaper players available since hardware companies no longer have to hedge their bets on the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD battle. Wait until this holiday season (or later, of course), and make sure to get one of the newer models. The only acceptable BRD players on the market right now are ones that just came out and are running about $800-$1000…in 10 months, that will drop dramatically.

In the meantime, the wife and I are enjoying HD movie rentals via the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Apple TV. A couple clicks, a few bucks on the credit card, wait a minute or two, and you can start watching a high-definition movie without ever leaving the house. But nothing will ever replace a physical copy of a movie you really love, and for those types of films Blu-Ray is the future. Just don’t jump in quite yet.