@William: Blu-ray is doing well, yes. I was at two Best Buys tonight and it's clear that Blu-ray is starting to edge HD-DVD in terms of selection, etc. (Blu-ray easily had double the shelf space and titles HD-DVD did).
BUT... that could change if the Blu-ray folks don't have a player that's competitive with the lower-end HD-DVD players. I'm not saying that they need to be on the same price level, but a Blu-ray player at $249 would make a lot of difference right now.
Sony and the other Blu-ray manufacturers do have to answer this price cut, and the 40GB PS3 isn't the answer (even with the free Spider-man 3). Otherwise we could be talking about Blu-ray's demise in a year's time.
Seriously, I haven't been keeping up to date on the US pricing but $199 is very good value, Its a great DVD player anyhow so for ANYONE thinking of spending $200 on a DVD player, its a no brainer.
Does make me wonder what the entry level for the Chinese players is gonna be in 6-9 months time, $99?
"Does make me wonder what the entry level for the Chinese players is gonna be in 6-9 months time, $99?"
That'll be a long time. The only reason the player is $200 is because it's heavily subsidized by Toshiba. There's more competition on Blu-ray players and they contain pretty much the same hardware as an HD DVD player, yet they are not that cheap yet.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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OK Sony, now it's your turn.
Sony doing realy well right now so i dont expect to see them grabbing at straws unless things turn around.
@William: Blu-ray is doing well, yes. I was at two Best Buys tonight and it's clear that Blu-ray is starting to edge HD-DVD in terms of selection, etc. (Blu-ray easily had double the shelf space and titles HD-DVD did).
BUT... that could change if the Blu-ray folks don't have a player that's competitive with the lower-end HD-DVD players. I'm not saying that they need to be on the same price level, but a Blu-ray player at $249 would make a lot of difference right now.
Sony and the other Blu-ray manufacturers do have to answer this price cut, and the 40GB PS3 isn't the answer (even with the free Spider-man 3). Otherwise we could be talking about Blu-ray's demise in a year's time.
All the HD-DVD's were sold out.
Seriously, I haven't been keeping up to date on the US pricing but $199 is very good value, Its a great DVD player anyhow so for ANYONE thinking of spending $200 on a DVD player, its a no brainer.
Does make me wonder what the entry level for the Chinese players is gonna be in 6-9 months time, $99?
"Does make me wonder what the entry level for the Chinese players is gonna be in 6-9 months time, $99?"
That'll be a long time. The only reason the player is $200 is because it's heavily subsidized by Toshiba. There's more competition on Blu-ray players and they contain pretty much the same hardware as an HD DVD player, yet they are not that cheap yet.