IT'S happened again. We have put off buying another piece of hi-tech equipment for so long that it's already been relegated to the scrapheap.

Having only relatively recently (four years ago is recent compared with the rest of the world) acquired a video recorder, we were certainly not about to rush out with everyone else and buy a DVD when they arrived on the market.

For a start, I hadn't actually managed to work the video, and still haven't. I can insert a cassette and press 'play', but apart from that I'm about as competent as I would be manning flight control at Heathrow.

So there was no way I was about to bring home another piece of equipment that would serve as a tool through which the kids could show me up. "But mu-uuuum, it's pipsqueak (that seems to be the word for 'easy-peasy'), you just do this and this." And in the blink of an eye, my eight-year-old has set the recorder for The Queen's Speech, Christmas 2008.

So DVDs became the norm, and our local video shop began stocking more and more of them, until I got slightly worried and toyed with the idea of having one.

By then, enough time had gone by for them to drop in price and people kept telling me how cheap they were - how you could get one free with oven chips in Asda, or buy one for peanuts in Tesco and get nine million clubcard points that would pay for a holiday in the Maldives.

I admit, I did have a sneaky look, but only because our TV, inherited from my late grandmother, isn't the best model ever invented (I think it was Logie Baird's prototype, so we never expected much) and I thought I'd heard about TV/DVD combos. But with my "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude, I resisted.

I'm so glad I did. Because now, DVDs are set to become things of the past. They are to follow the video cassette into the dustbin of technological history, to be replaced by the HVD - Holographic Versatile Disc - which holds more information, is faster and better quality. It can hold as much stuff as 200 standard DVD discs and transfer information at least 40 times faster. If used like an ordinary video recorder, it could record six channels of TV for ten days non-stop.

So now everyone who rushed out and bought a DVD will be looking at it with disdain and itching to get their hands on an HVD, whereas I can take that enormous leap forward from video to the super-incredible HVD, cutting out the middle-man completely.

It is not the first time my husband and I have by-passed now-defunct technology. For years I owned an extremely basic word processor, resisting the lure of a computer.

By the time I finally succumbed, the shops were heaving with flat screens, laser printers and broadband internet access, at a fraction of the price they had been a decade earlier. There have been many other examples, too numerous to mention.

So lagging behind advances in technology never did us any harm. Which makes me think, HVD? We don't need it. Its days are bound to be numbered. We may as well wait for the ZVD which will be faster than the speed of light and will never run out of space, ever.

Updated: 09:39 Tuesday, March 15, 2005