To most, the recent format war was boring, unnecessary and hyped out of all proportion to the number of people who actually cared. DVDs were fine, no one even had HD tellies, and the thought of shelling out what were then £400+ prices for what could soon become obsolete understandably put off, well, everybody except the movie studios.

When the PlayStation 3 arrived with a Blu-ray drive there was only going to be one winner, and HD-DVD duly succumbed as the studios deserted it. With HDTV sales booming, what should have been the turning point for Blu-ray adoption ended up making practically no difference to the take-up rate, and while the studios are so quick to make excuses that’s entirely their own fault.

You could go into the lack of advertising until relatively recently, or the high cost of the players; but the biggest mistake the studios made was to break the golden rule of launching a new format: they didn’t bother releasing any good films.

This seemingly obvious rule didn’t enter Sony’s thinking as the first launch titles were announced back in 2006. Hitch, 50 First Dates, House of Flying Daggers, UnderWorld Evolution, xXx, The Fifth Element – any of those get you itching to stump up £400? Nope, me neither.

With these and the next few rounds of releases, Sony seemed most intent on releasing films several years old, and getting the family market interested – which was never going to work at early adopter prices. Most of the first wave of titles were just rushed, feature-free HD conversions of older films, which isn’t likely to tempt people who already own the DVD, especially as upscaling DVD players are so common now.

I bring all of this up because Blu-ray has at last been growing of late, with Iron Man and several other films garnering strong, if not stellar, sales figures. It’s been getting closer to the tipping point, just a nudge away from entering the mainstream consciousness – but it still needed its one killer app.

Then this week The Dark Knight was released on Blu-ray. It’s a film so perfectly suited to HD that its release was a no-brainer, but I think even Sony has been surprised by how well it’s sold: a hefty 1.7m Blu-ray copies, or up to 30% of the all-formats total - with 600,000 on the first day alone.

It’s no great surprise that this well-made Blu-ray of an absolutely stunning film - complete with iMax segments for the biggest scenes – has smashed the records to become the format’s first must-have title. What is surprising is that it’s taken the studios so long to realise we’re not mugs, we won’t just shell out money for whatever tat they put out there because we don’t know any better.

Far from being reluctant to adopt because we’re idiots who don’t know anything about technology, as the studios’ approach until recently has implied, it seems the public has just been waiting politely for the big studios to, you know, take the time and effort to make a good film into a good Blu-ray package. Hardly rocket science, Sony.