Samsung Discontinues BD-UP5000, Toshiba Heard Crying

With so many people ringing HD-DVD’s Death Bell these days, I can barely hear myself think. It seems like Samsung is the latest in the long line of people to declare the death of HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray the victor in the format battle. It’s kind of a bummer, too, because the BD-UP5000 was a nice little dual format player. It came with HDMI 1.3, full 1080p support, an ethernet cable (for some reason), and the ability to play Betamax 2 HD-DVDs as well as Sony’s Blu-Ray format. This news is especially rough on me personally, because I have invested so much into the HD-DVD format. I bought my whole family HD-DVD shirts and players and movies for Christmas. And by “my whole family” I mean “me”, and by “Christmas” I mean “A week ago”. Oh well, I guess I can just put all that in the heap next to my Apple Newton, Divx player, BetaMax, IBM’s PCjr, Sega Dreamcast, and WebTV.