HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far

Dster76 writes "Reuters is reporting that the new format wars are showing signs of underwhelming performance, both technically and financially. In fact, according to the article, the new formats are just not selling. Reuters chalks it up to a current lack of interest. They indicate that as more movies and players become available this autumn, sales should improve. Just the same, the current picture is quite sour." From the article: "'Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,' said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. 'High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular,' Dybdahl said. 'Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,' he said."

Comments

Re:forget movies, I want cheap fast data backup

[The MAZZTer]

It's called buying another hard-drive. Get an external one for best portability-ness. Then you can just drag and drop, or use a backup tool to do the work for you. Windows Live OneCare includes such a tool even has explicit support for automatic backup to an external drive... although I've never tested it and I don't usually use backup tools thus I don't know how it stacks up.

32 bit Vista & HD Content

[in2mind]

Not to forget this:

The media companies asked us to do this and said they don't want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this

Covered earlier in slashdot

Re:maybe, a scan line too far

[Jherek Carnelian]

Your sig: "Virii" isn't a word, you frigging morons.

Big deal.

spam
laudromat
blog
quark
prequel
genocide
meritocracy
meme
robotics
infotainment

Just some of the thousands of "not words" that are now words - many of which replaced perfectly good phrases with the same meaning - just as "virii" is used to mean "computer viruses."

If everyone thought like your sig, language would quickly become to unwieldy to be of much use and we would all end up going mute.

Re:What a shocker

[cbreaker]

"There's a lot of things that I'd rather be doing than watching tv"

That's what you said. Reason would have it that you meant you don't generally enjoy TV. If you meant something else, or if you meant to be more specific, you might have mentioned that.

HDTV is expensive right now. That's NOT in dispute. What is in dispute is that a lot of people claim to ne be able to tell the difference between HDTV and SDTV, and I think that's bullshit. If you have a nice TV and a nice HDTV signal, it will be really impressive, and anyone would love to watch HDTV instead of SD.

I do agree, that because of the costs, for many people they just don't care at this point. The same was true for Color TV. Color sets were way more expensive then B&W, and not a lot of programming was color. Color didn't improve the show, it just made watching the show more enjoyable. I believe the same is true for HDTV. Eventually (and you can see it now) HD prices will drop to what we saw for SDTV's before HD started taking over the store shelves. Even now, you can get a CRT HDTV for a very affordable price, or a lower end plasma for less then $1000. In 2000, I purchased a 32" Sony Trinitron CRT TV for $850. In another year or so, you'll easily be able to beat that price with a similarly sized HDTV.

It's a transition period and the manufacturers are milking it. It doesn't mean HDTV isn't a great technology. It will improve everything from Movies and TV to game systems and computers in the living room.