Noooooooo! I bought Betamax again.

My parents bought a Sony Betamax video player. I have lived with the shame my entire life. Endless reiteration of the age old arguments: the better quality of the Beta tapes, the general relaibility and quality of the Sony recorders, didn't save us. One of the most traumatic days of my life, came at the start of a summer holiday. My mum drove me to the video store so that I could rent a load of holiday movies. When I went to the back of the store, where the Beta tapes were hidden, I found that they had been replaced by discount VHS tapes. The embarresment, the shame, the patronising looks from the staff, all these I had to contend with, and all because my parents hadn't thought their format choices through.

But VHS won the day, as did CD's and Sony actually helped to cement the DVD (one format only) revolution by including a player on the PS2. All was well.

A month ago I went into a Blockbuster in Hertfordshire and noticed they had both of the all new HD formats for rent. A few weeks later I bought a new TV when our old one sparked up and died. Once I watched a few hours of normal TV on the new telly, I decided that it was time to give it the format it needs to shine. As I already own an X-box 360 the only way I could afford to enjoy HD viewing pleasure was to buy an external HD drive it.

So, with my newfound HD-DVD player running I go back to Blockbuster to rent some movies to watch this half term, only to find they have stopped stocking HD-DVD's and now only stock Blue-ray. Arghhhhhhh! It's all happened again, to me, and this time it's my fault! I then took a look at the HD section of HMV and realised how many films are blue-ray only.

Now 24 hours later I have calmed down. I have come up with my list of reasons why it isn't so bad, and that I am not a technological outcast, destined to search garage sales and bargain bins for examples of the "dead" format I invested in. Here they are:

1) You couldn't play Beta on VHS. With HD-DVD I can still play them on DVD machines.

2)Nobody ever made a dual format tape recorder. There are dual format machines already available and in the years to come I can get one if Blue-ray wins the day.

3)The HD drive is still useful, I didd't have an upscaling DVD player before, so my old DVD's look better anyway.

But, the real thing that makes me happy, is that HD dvd and Blue-ray are BOTH Betamax. They just haven't sold enough PS3's or Xbox drives to get them into enough homes to make the formats truely viable. DVD only took hold because of the PS2, becasue until it came out they couldn't even settle on a universal encoding.

So I can watch this argument run, safe in the knowledge that we are probable all losers.

And deep down, I know that betamax was far better than VHS, it was all to do with.......