Any company which wishes to remain in business selling HDDVD players will include a red laser as well as a blue laser assembly so it will be backwards compatible with regular DVD format. HDDVD will not benefit anyone except those with high quality HD displays-playing them on a conventional non HD TV set is even more useless than owning anamorphically enhanced DVDs, as you obviously cannot take advantage of the format's superior image quality. My guess is that the new format will be slow to gain acceptance, as most consumers will not see a need to upgrade, especially when the physical media is so similar. For this reason it will likely be expensive for the first several years.