Slashdot Mirror
Blu-ray Discs Won't Be Cheap
frdmfghtr writes "Red Herring has a story on the forthcoming price of Sony Blu-Ray HD DVDs. At $23.45 wholesale, they aren't cheap. From the article: 'Some of the movies to be released in the first batch by Sony are The Fifth Element, Desperado, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, Legends of the Fall, and Terminator. Sony's wholesale price of $23.45 for Blu-ray discs is 56 percent more than the $14.99 it costs to buy a new DVD of Hitch from BestBuy.com. A Terminator DVD is available for $9.99.' Another reader suggested a link to an Ars Technica article with more information.
You missed an important point. The $23.45 is a wholesale price. When the wholesale price of the item is about 60% more than the retail price of a competing item, there's enough of a difference to sit up and take notice.
I should point out that "Sony Blu-Ray HD DVDs" is probabyly a bad phrase to use, as the main competetor to 'Blu-Ray' is 'HD-DVD' (Yes, HD applies to Blu-Ray too).
With regard to the competition, ZDNet has coverage of Blu-Rays expected cost compared to HD-DVD based on the retooling cost, which experts expect could be up to $1 billion worldwide for Blu-Ray, and one tenth of that for HD-DVD (Which relies on pretty simmilar technology to existing DVDs).
One other point which may help out HD-DVD is the materiel cost. HD-DVD uses the the same materiels as DVD, whereas Blu-Ray uses a "high-tech film layer currently produced only by Sony."
What might be most damaging for Blu-Ray however, is Microsoft's direct support for HD-DVD. They've already announced that Longhorn will support HD-DVD, and the XBox360 will be recieving an HD-DVD addon. (Its in various news sources that I won't ref here).
This may be a Betamax type thing where the technically superiour device doesn't win due to corporate activity.
Obligitory wikipedia links:
Blu-Ray
HD DVD
Betamax
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
What's the retail price for the average Xbox game versus wholesale on the average Xbox 360 game? How about the retail cost of a VHS _player_ versus the wholesale cost of a DVD player when DVD first debuted?
Early adopters will cough up the money without taking notice. Late adopters won't ever have a price difference to notice.
A B A C A B B
VHS movies had a rental window when they'd be sold to Blockbuster-style outfits for $80+ for a few months before dropping to $20-30 for everyone else to buy. DVDs never had rental pricing; they started at around $20-30 and went down from there as they got old and/or new "special editions" arrived on the shelves. I don't recall either format having an obscene initial cost for general consumption.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
"They'll claim that in time, the price to the consumer will come down. (See also: "The history of compact disc pricing")."
For the benefit of our younger readers who might think CD prices have always been about the same: when I started buying them in 1984, I paid about $20 per CD, to play on my $250 CD player.
That's the equivalent of a $37 CD playing on a $460 CD player, kids!
By comparison, in 2003 the average price of a new CD was $13.42, and by the end of 2004, it was down to $12.95. In other words, CD prices have fallen by 2/3 in the time I've been buying them. I wish I could say the same thing about clothes, food and gas.
The point is: just be glad you were born in the 80's or 90's. You're paying 66% less for CDs than I was at your age, and if you happen to be a fan of P2P, you can get all the music you want for free. The other point is that people who try to tell you that CD prices haven't gone down are, quite simply, lying to you.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution."
That statement is inaccurate.
NTSC DVD: 640x480=307200 pixels
HDTV: 1920x1080=2073600 pixels
2073600/307200=6.75
That isn't even a single order of magnitude more pixels - just little more than half. If we were comparing PAL instead of NTSC the difference with HDTV would be even less.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.