My goodness, I've been gone for a long time!
What a saga! I finally made up my mind that I was going to dive into one of the high def DVD formats, and I've chosen Blu-Ray. It has support of more studios than its rival format HD-DVD. Its discs have more storage capacity. It has the mighty Sony behind it. Sony lost out with Betamax, but it seems to be on the right side of the fence this time out. Tape recording time was the key to the win/loss in the VHS/Beta war, and I'm guessing greater capacity discs and almost full studio support (of the major studios, only Universal does not support Blu-Ray currently) will tip the scales toward Blu-Ray in this war.
At any rate, the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there is the Playstation 3 videogame machine, and we know how rare a species they are right now. But there are THOUSANDS of them for sale at Ebay, and for fun, I've been putting my lowball bids in (more for fun than anything; always below list price which practically assured I wouldn't win; folks wanted $1000 for $500 machines).
Wouldn't you know it? I was the second highest bidder on a machine yesterday, and the winner didn't claim his prize, so the seller offered me a Second Chance offer with my lowball/under retail bid as the winning bid! So, I'm going to be watching high definition DVDs within the next week or two. I had to wire the money through Western Union, and I had never done this before, so I was out and about taking care of this earlier today.