As we all know, the ongoing format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray is very, very far from over and it will take some time before the winner is decided. However, as part of their marketing campaigns, the group supporting each format makes all sorts of more or less realistic claims regarding who's actually leading in this race and the latest such statement comes from the European HD DVD promotional group, whose representatives are claiming that their "format of heart" is leading 3:1 over its rival.

Thus, according to an article published by Reuters, the group supporting HD DVD claimed that it had attained a 74 percent market share in U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland for stand-alone players, quoting sales figures it commissioned from market research group GfK. Moreover, according to a statement for Reuters by Olivier Van Wynendaele, Toshiba's spokesman for the European HD DVD group, the profit margins for its HD DVD players were comparable to those for its DVD players in Europe and the company wasn't selling its products at a loss in the US (as many people believe).

However, this study is a bit tricky and clearly carried out for marketing and promotional purposes. Thus, first of all, the HD DVD group, led by Toshiba Corp. and backed by Microsoft and film studios including Warner Bros. declined to give figures for how many players it had shipped to retail outlets in Europe. Moreover, the study only took into consideration the sales of standalone Blu-ray players, but not those of PS3 units, which are currently the most popular Blu-ray players on the market.

One of the reasons why HD DVD players' sales have risen is the fact that Toshiba cut prices for its HD-E1 HD DVD player to 399 Euros ($549) in Europe and $299 in the United States last month from 499 Euro and $399, respectively. However, these prices are still rather high and in order to achieve that mass-retailing and DVD replacement goal they're targeting, both groups will certainly have to double their efforts and cut the price tags even more. We only hope that this thing will happen very, very soon.

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