By John DeFore

Lured by heavy promotion from retailers and the promise of insanely detailed sports broadcasts, millions of American households have now bought HDTV sets. Most of those households, however, are still watching movies using ordinary, standard-definition DVD players, which means they aren’t getting nearly the picture quality they should expect from those expensive displays.

Electronics companies would love to change that, and soon. The problem is, they’ve introduced two rival technologies that each hope to become the new standard for high-definition content. The inventors of the new formats, known as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, stand to gain or lose a fortune if one technology is favored by consumers; we, on the other hand, risk buying one type of player (and the discs to play on it) and seeing it become obsolete, Beta-style, within a few years.

Polls suggest that the average consumer has heard the names of these new formats but barely has a clue what they’re about. Meanwhile, ads and in-store displays tend to tout one brand while pretending the other doesn’t exist. If you’re considering buying a next-generation player, it pays to know what you’re getting into.

Both technologies play discs that look exactly like regular DVDs (in stores, they’re set apart from DVDs by smaller, slimmer packaging), and each type of player is “backwards-compatible,” meaning your old discs will still work on it. Both offer spectacular picture quality and richer soundtracks — while you might have a hard time hearing the audio difference without a finely-tuned (and expensive) speaker setup, the improvement in picture quality is easy to see. Both are capable of adding more (and more interactive) bonus content than you’ll ever see on a regular DVD. (This can easily become a distraction, though, as studios spend more time inventing high-tech features that have little to do with enjoying the movie-watching experience, or even detract from it.)

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