The Holiday shopping season is around the corner and hopes that the HD DVD players will win consumers over are high. Tohsiba’s player lost $100 off its original price and now retails for $198, thus making it an appealing offer. Add to that the fact that the HD DVD side now has the fastest and best-selling week one release on either high definition format (Transformers sold over 100,000 units during its first day of release and over 190,000 HD DVDs in its first week) and you can see why things are starting to look better for the backers of the format.

Then again, the format might be in a clearing, but is not out of the woods yet. First of all, chances are that the recent price drop is only meant to clear up current A2 stocks so that a new model ( the new A3) would fill in the empty spot, at a higher price, of course.

Second, Transformers might be the best selling next-gen format title so far, but there’s no guarantee that it will keep its title in the near future. Spider-Man 3 gets released on Blu-Ray today and might brake the previous record. Furthermore, the Blu-ray format is still champion of disc retail, having managed to sell almost twice than the rival side.

Last but not least, consumers are still reluctant to go for one of the two format, for fear they would end up in the losing side in the future and would rather continue to place their bets on the old DVD format. Transformers’ record of 100,000 HD DVDs looks rather pale when compared to the 4.5 million DVDs on the first day.