Blu-ray Player Prices Hit 2008 Highs

An anonymous reader writes "HD DVD is almost gone and Blu-ray prices are already on their way up. TG Daily went through average retail prices of some of the popular Blu-ray players and found that you should expect to pay at least $400 for an entry-level Blu-ray player, while you could get a player for less than $330 in February. It really should not be a surprise for all of us, but it is interesting to see how quickly retail adjusted to the new situation and increased prices."

Re:PS3

[Quasar1999]

Umm PS3 is already $399... if it drops $100 then wouldn't it be $299?

Price go up, price go down

[Mogster]

Potential competition from HD-DVD helped keep prices low to attract consumers. HD-DVD has lost so there is less incentive to keep the prices low. Once there are more manufacturers producing Blu-ray players then prices will start to drop again.
Market forces at work

Re:Great- no more format war!

[DrXym]

This monopoly is so much better for the consumer.

Monopoly? Last I heard, virtually every major CE manufacturer with the exception of Toshiba was competing for the blu ray money in your pocket. Even Toshiba has a 50% stake in a company producing blu ray drives so I'm sure they come out of their period of mourning soon enough.

Prices will drop through competition and economies of scale.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[Kensai7]

Rightly said. The raise will certainly be temporary. In a couple of months Blu-ray competition will drive the prices again down.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:PS3 Sales the motivator here?

[Grimbleton]

Silly, just put the PS3 on TOP. Problem solved.

Re:Still competing with DVD

[Pecisk]

I am getting kinda tired from this meme and it just gives impression of fox who can't get the grapes (Nah, HD is all way down to be closed, we have hacked our systems to play DVDs without control, so they just fine). Yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray didn't matter until new line of high definition displays with reasonable price. However, now they kicked in and anyone who has seen results (Samsung K.I.N.O. line is very big example) would be stupid to claim that it isn't better (it is and man, I have seen movies/formats on so many types of monitors/displays/cinema screens). Well, it is expensive to adapt HD video, but people will do it slowly.

So my impression that Blu-ray rises just because people start to see reasonable displays to watch those HD discs with. NOW there is reason to addopt it. Sadly for Microsoft and people who oppose Sony, they won this time. In fact, with right strategy.

Yes, I left out all issue with DRM, because it doesn't matter for common people. Like it or not.

Of course, just mine two cents,
Peter.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[vivek7006]

Yeah, because we all know this evil DVD monopoly drove DVD player

This time its different because the blu-ray consortium is not giving licenses to tom-dick-harry shop in china to make cheap players. So unlike the DVD, this time around we wont be seeing cheap DVD players. I still remember that it was some Chinese brand (apex?) which broke the $100 barrier for DVD-players and became the largest selling dvd player right behind Sony. With tighter licensing restrictions, thats not going to happen this time around with Blu-ray payers

Re:hmm

[Dogtanian]

Will a lot of people even know that hd-dvd is dead? They will just see how cheap it is.

The majority of people who know enough about it to know why they want it (and why it's better than "ordinary" DVD) will know why it's so cheap.

If at the right time they could resurect it and keep the prices way below blu-ray they could make a comeback.

Unlikely- the format has been publicly disowned, and this has been accepted (and even pushed by) the industry across the board (including retailers, hardware manufacturers and film studios). Even if HD-DVD becomes briefly popular because of Lemming-like selling-off, it's not going to come back to life. The studios aren't going to shift back their multi-billion dollar commitments simply because of a brief price-driven surge.

People will *know* that the reason HD-DVD is cheap is because it's dead. That's not a good long-term plan. At best, some studios might release a few more films in HD-DVD format than they might have otherwise.

A similar suggestion was made when HD-DVD was starting to seriously flounder, but before it was clear that it was going to be abandoned. Toshiba slashed the prices [slashdot.org], and some thought it might kick-start things. Even that was clearly a desparate measure, but things were different then- the race was still going.

Now the HD-DVD horse is dead, the defibrilators have been packed away and the vets have gone home.

It's not going to happen.

Myself, I would buy an hd-dvd burner and media right now if the prices were really low, just for storage purposes.

I wouldn't; even if the price is relatively cheap compared to writable Blu-Ray, I still doubt it's *that* cheap. As the price of BR falls, it'll pass it. Meanwhile, you'll have committed your existing data to a soon-to-be-obsolete format, you'll have to faff about with EBay to get another drive to read your discs if the first fails, and supplies of writable HD-DVD discs will likely dry up quite quickly and soon rise in price, since I can't see them being manufactured for very long now. (It's unlikely there's a critical mass of existing HD-DVD burner users who'd be worth keeping the HD-DVD-R factory lines going for).

Re:Great- no more format war!

[Zymergy]

Don't Forget about the famed Apex AD-600a! http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/21/1233235 [slashdot.org]
http://www.nerd-out.com/darrenk/600/history.htm [nerd-out.com]

It was the model to have (with the correct firmware revision) with its famous "Engineering Menu" which allowed the "Macrovision" encoding to be *disabled* and you could change it to *any* region code as many times as you desired.
DRM sucks. This Apex model *Proved* that fact to me with its 'usefulness' back in 2000 (when I took off work early to go buy one from Circuit City). It's now 8 Years old and still kicking! Good Times.

Re:Just kill it already.

[ODiV]

It's not like the US doesn't already ignore NAFTA when it doesn't work to their advantage (see Canadian softwood lumber).

Re:Great- no more format war!

[Grave]

HD-DVD (which arrived at retail in mid 2006) lost because the 360 (which arrived at retail in late 2005) didn't include it as standard? Putting an HD-DVD drive into the 360 at the time of launch may have been an impossibility due to the maturity level of the technology. It certainly would have been a financial impossibility for the price, which was considered high at the time. Had the 360 been $100 more at launch than it was (which would've also meant MS would be losing substantially more money per console), adoption would have been much slower than it was. Microsoft is more concerned with winning the console war than fighting in a storage medium war. Offering the HD-DVD addon was merely a ploy to slow PS3 adoption and possibly hurt Sony. What might have been more effective would be if they had offered a $200 Bluray addon instead of the HD-DVD offering. Thus, the sales case for the PS3, when the games library was so small, would no longer have included BR. BR is the only reason I bought my PS3. Having the option of playing a few exclusive games at some point is nice, but not an argument for buying yet another expensive console when I already own a 360 that will be able to play 95% of the games the PS3 can (at least of the ones I'm interested in).

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[otis wildflower]

Did you actually use those more "powerful" features?

You mean like PiP? Sure did, the _300_ commentary was pretty sweet (once I got a disc that wouldn't freeze), and the 1st season of Star Trek is all about the PiP..

Networking? _Transformers_ had downloadable images, presumably _Be Kind Rewind_ would have been great with this feature (user-contributed sweded videos)...

Annoying memes.

[serviscope_minor]

There has been an annyoing meme on /. recently among a small, but noticable minority, namely: the free market KING and the goivernment should SFTU and GBTW so to speak.

This is a classic example of a free market failure. One player paid an enourmous amount of money ($400 million) to kill the other player. Now that the other player is as good as gone, the prices have risen.

This is an excellent example where the free market fails: corporate collusion destroyed it.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Albanach]

Storage is cheap, obscenely so, but until a basic off the shelf computer comes with more than this that's all your average user will have for memory. 2GB. In other words, not enough for more than one movie. If that.

You do realise the difference between RAM and Hard Drives, don't you? Those Dell's all come with a hard drive between 250GB and 500GB - easily enough to store several downloaded HD movies. I'd expect all but the cheapest one could even play the movie in full 1080P HD with a suitable monitor attached and run Vista at the same time.

I really don't see many desktop apps that demand more than 2GB of RAM. I'm certainly not rushing out to upgrade any of my 2GB machines.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Anonymous Coward]

Were all your DVD players obsolete when component video came out? What about when Surround Sound came out? Why does having an extra feature that is not required to watch the original movie make a player obsolete? How about DVD+/-R?

I have one of the earliest DVD players. It has component video, Dolby 5.1 and can play DVD+/-R with no problems. Blu-Ray clearly was rushed and early players can't access features that later players can. I have no such problem with my early DVD player.

Yeah, reducing trade is such a great idea...

[Goonie]

Your ideas were tried in 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act [wikipedia.org]. It didn't cause the Great Depression on its own, but it made it a whole lot worse.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[batkiwi]

A few points:
-The DVD player I bought in 1999 had component video output and optical/co-ax surround output
-Dolby Digital surround was part of the ORIGINAL spec for DVD
-I bought a reciever too early. It supported DD but not DTS. Saving Private Ryan only had surround for DTS, the DD track was stereo. I was angry.
-New profile Blu-Ray players will NOT be $200 at christmas. What makes you think this?

Re:Props for Big Black mention -old time fav

[AnotherBlackHat]

I can see a difference between 600 and 1200 DPI on a printed page, but I can't see any difference between 1600 and 2000 DPI.
But I don't think it's DPI that really defines the limit here;
According to http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html [gsu.edu] there are about 120 million rods in the human eye.
Even though they aren't evenly distributed, I'd hazard that a 12k x 10k display will be close enough to human perception that further "improvements" in resolution won't be discernible.

We aren't there yet, but it doesn't seem all that far off either.

-- Should you believe authority without question?

Re:Still competing with DVD

[Ragnarr]

Tivo HD only works with OTA and cable currently. The satellite providers have a waiver from having to provide cable cards to their consumers from the FCC; without cable cards your Tivo HD can't even give you program guide information unless you're OTA. Your only options are the in-house products from Dish (pretty good) or D* (not so much from what I've read).

Personally, I just gave up Dish so I could enjoy TivoHD; the interface means more to me than being able to stick it to my crappy cable company.

Re:Still competing with DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

From: http://www3.tivo.com/store/boxes.do [tivo.com]

(The fine print)...

TiVo® HD and Series3(TM) HD DVR: Does not support satellite service.

Sorry...

Re:Just kill it already.

[ODiV]

The dispute is over hardwood,

The [www.cbc.ca] dispute [wikipedia.org] is [thestar.com] about [yahoo.com] softwood [209.85.173.104]. This can be confirmed in about two minutes on Google.

and NAFTA clearly shouldn't apply when you are destroying the environment to undercut your competitors.

Do you really think that the US was imposing duties for environmental reasons? Seriously?

Can't argue with you about the government's action re: the preservation of the spotted owl [davidsuzuki.org] though. I'm not a big fan of North America's lack of respect for the environment as a whole. Then again, I could be doing a hell of a lot more personally.

Re:Not quite

[DrXym]

Off the top of my head you can buy players from Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Denon, Marantz and Pioneer. Since I have no idea where you live or where you buy your electronics from I can't comment whether you can find them in bricks & mortar stores or not. I expect most dedicated AV stores would stock several models. I expect stores like Best Buy etc. do too or will before long.