"though had only notched up bids of £55 with seven minutes to go."

Could you not have waited the seven minutes and told us what they fetched?

I'm going to use my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive as an external DVD Reader for my Mac - waste not, want not etc...

Both Amazon and Play are giving away the EP-30 for a ridiculous £77. The EP-35 is also available for around the £150 mark. That EP-30 price is quite good considering that it does a great job of upscaling DVD. Look at it as a standard def DVD player with Hi-Def functionality thrown in.

...is NOT £160. It may have been *at* £160 when you looked, with several days to go on the auctions, but a bit of ohsodifficult quick research shows that you'll still be looking at over £300 at the end.

Let's face it, just how much life has High-Def in disk format got anyway? I'm waiting for solid state; I've had enough disks go west on me over the years to think that forking out the levels of cash required is just not workth it. I'm hanging on for the next generation.

if plugged into the DVI input of a 1600 x 1200 PC monitor?

Would they just output at VGA resolution, would they upscale to 1600 x 1200 or just put out something the screen couldn't use?

Disk formats will probably always be preferable to solid state because they are far cheaper and easier to make and more offen than not a lot less environmentally damaging.

Solid state formats will only come into common use when there is a device which you can download multiple films to and an agreement for a player technology, which with the SS market the way it is at the moment, currently isn't going to happen. Also, people like having a box with their film in it, this isn't giong to change any time soon. All of the current SS technologies rely upon ripping an existing media.

If you want to know how much items are going for on eBay, don't rely on the £X amount with 5 minutes to go. We all know that most auctions shoot up in price in the last few seconds.

Instead do an advanced search and tick the "completed listings only" box. That'll list the closing price for past auctions.

Oh yes, if you want to exclude chinese stuff, select only items within 500 miles of birmingham

I would say an hdmi-> dvi lead would allow you to use your monitor quite nicely, im unsure whether these players would require some sort of hdcp compliancy in the display however,

Anyone know if the EP30 can be hacked to play normal DVDs region free? If so it'd be a steal at this price even with the format war decided!

It's almost worth grabbing a 360 HD drive cheap along with movies just to rip them onto a hard drive, that way you can serve them via MythTV and the likes round your house if you have such a setup without having to bother with physical media! Certainly saves a lot of time over trying to download 30gb each time ;)

...if I'd shell out even a hundred pounds on an essentially defunct format the instant I even unbox the thing.

The obvious reasons spring to mind - It'll simply be an expensive toy that plays only dozens of older movies (UMD format springs to mind too). Its gone the way of the 8-track - albeit with far better quality. Leave it there.

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@Michelle - I'm not sure the studios would be so quick to adopt solid state (SSD) tech - To compete with BluRay, it would have to be at least 25Gb (currently around 150 quid for only 16Gb), plus it would have to be altered to be read only and have anti-copy protection built in, it would require lightning fast transfer speeds (already possible though) a movie format standard would probably need redesigning from the ground up for SSD,

Oh and theres likely to be yet another HDDVD-BluRay or Beta/VHS format war for solid state drives between different companies too.

Oh I have no doubt it'll be on its way, its smaller, much more resilient to damage, but is prone to individual bit failures all the time - you just dont see it, but I reckon BluRay has five or ten years or so over SSD yet.

Great upscaling player and access to 300+ HD movies for next to nothing. No brainer really. Then when you've watched them all, either use it as an upscaler or a door stop. Who cares :-).

Doesn't stop you getting into Blu-Ray too of course for all the new releases, though you won't be seeing them this cheap for a long time ;-)

"Betamax and Mini Disc being regularly traded and ultimately becoming collecters items"

I just looked, $12.99 for 10 minidiscs, that's less than I was paying for them brand new 6 years ago. I'm not exactly sitting on a goldmine made out of L@@K R@RE, am I?

Maybe in another decade or so! Yeah! Throw in all my old audio cassettes and those half-a-dozen 3" CF2 floppies I still have somewhere and that's my retirement plan sorted, according to eBay. Sweet!

Oh wait, betamax tapes are only going for B.I.N. of $2/each. Bugger, looks like it's back to playing the lottery.

Sounds like eBay trying to drum up some business off the back of others' misfortune if you ask me.

Umm, does the embedded DRM in all these new formats allow for that ? I've read that, in order to get the normal HD-size on your screen, all the components had to have the proper, certified, nanny chip in, otherwise it would be downgraded to VHS-quality or even not displayed at all.

That's what put me off either formats, that and the fact that my hardware could apparently be remotely shut off by the Central License Coordination Agency if they thought I had pirate hardware, or if my hardware phoned home to tell the CLCA that I was reading pirate content.

I don't condone piracy, but I'll be damned if I accept that my hard-earned money can be blown off by some jerk with a kill button without my having a say.