I went through the VHS, lasor disk war in the past.  A lot of people got stuck with those big record size disks that Sony was trying to win with.  45% of the studios are going hddvd, 45% going with blueray and 10% are doing both.  So if you buy a hddvd and the movie you want is only on blueray, your screwed and of course, the other way around.  So I'd wait.  I'am to old to worry, I'll stick to dvd's.  

Yes, I'm old enough to have gone through that too. Right now, that's exactly what I plan to do until there is enough to warrant a purchase one way or another. We probably will be looking at Holographic Memory devices in 5-7 years down the road if the indicators are true but I figure if I can get 2-3 years out of a format before it's almost obsolete, I'm doing pretty good, at least in the context of how fast the technology is evolving.

I have both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray drives through Xbox 360 and PS3. I do not buy disks. I only rent them. I really don't care who wins in this race. My media is all on hard drives. I do not need to worry about DRM because they are home videos. In this age digitization, I will not pay to keep media. I can get it when I want to watch them and return them to save precious space.

But I am not going to miss out on the quality of high defintion today because there is a format war going on out there or because something is coming up in a decade. I learned that life is too short for waiting for stuff. Well, I do wait for 6 months to an year when I know there is a clear roadmap and things are not in experimental stage.

It doesn't provide enough difference from DVDs for me, so I will wait for newer media.

This might be a problem solver.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070104-8550.html

A HD DVD and Blu-Ray Hybrid player.

Chances are that on a 42" TV you may not notice much of difference between an upscaling DVD player and an HD player. Most of my friends could not see difference between 1080i & 1080p on a 52" TV.