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Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players
Lord Byron II writes "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores, primarily because of the high cost of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD (now under $200). They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being. Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"
... on a Blu-Ray player?
Darn...
Until the pirate community has made a decision, I'm waiting before I commit.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
No. There's no content available, and the improvement over DVD isn't nearly enough to make people rush out and buy any kind of HD DVD any time soon.
Ray: Kmart sucks.
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
Who the hell buys electronics at Kmart, anyway?
blu-ray at kmart? that's like trying to sell benz's in the ghetto at retail prices.
K-Mart is still around?
Get out the tinfoil hats but I wonder if the HD-DVD group "persuaded" K-Mart with a wack of cash to dump BR ala Paramount?
I Like Pie...
Rumor has it walmart will have the toshiba A2 hd-dvd for $98 on black friday
http://www.cnbc.com/id/21581845
It makes sense, in a twisted kinda way. If you were the average joe who had no clue, which would you want? Something with an unfamiliar name, or something named with HD and DVD right in the title? What if that second one was around half the price?
You realize that it's been years now, right? And that there hasn't been a winner yet. A PS3 is like $400. A HDDVD player is like $200. If you buy either and the associated media format fades into obscurity it's not that big a deal - especially compared to the nice HDTV you'd have to get to make it matter at all.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Just a little bias in the article post: "They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being".
1.) The PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, arguably the best, that's what I bought mine for.
2.) "Time Being" meaning to imply Kmart may drop the PS3 also? And not sell all 3 of the current generation game players? Not likely.
HD-DVD could win, but in general people are not buying quality 1080P HDTVs at Kmart, they are buying cut rate 720P stuff that doesn't look that much better with HD-DVD than upscaled DVD.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't good for Blu-Ray, but it isn't the sky falling either.
Letter To Iran
WalMart has the Toshiba HD A2 for $98.87 as of 8am on November 2nd 2007.
http://holiday.ri-walmart.com/?u1=433093-2-0-ARTICLE-0§ion=secret&utm_source=Walmartcom
I believe they may include the free 5 HD DVDs deal, which alone is worth $100.
I'd say that is breaking the price barrier holding back acceptance!!
(I know I'm buying two, one for us, and one for my inlaws for Christmas)
Kmart to drop Blue Ray sales and Wal-Mart to sell a sub-$100 HD DVD player. http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34650/97/ See the pattern here? Both Kmart and Walmart are among the top leading names in budget department stores.
Video-on-demand, both on cable and via internet, will make blu-ray / HD-DVD irrevelant ...
... and with ever increasing affordable, even free (ie. YouTube / Wifi, etc), bandwidth, VoD is well on the way to drive the newer physical HD formats to a premature extinction.
Sure some people will buy / use such players, but most people are skipping right to utilizing video-on-demand instead
Ron
One of these things is just like the others.
All of these things plainly belong.
Can you tell what point that I am making,
by the time I finish my song?
Three of these things belong together
Three of these things are kind of the same
Can you guess what point I am making?
Now it's time to play our game
It's the other way around.. Kmart owns Sears.. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6509683/
It's movie sales that count, so even if they sold a ton of cheap players unless that translates to dramatically higher media sales HD-DVD still has problems - and look at the lackluster release lineup the rest of the year!
The best week HD-DVD ever had was the recent Transformers release. In that week, Blu-Ray movies still managed to outsell HD-DVD! So what happens now that Spider Man 3 and other large hits are coming out Blu-Ray only?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People don't know anything about one format or the other, or even care, but they know HD is good and DVD sounds familiar and easy to use. HD-DVD was a great move because it leveraged the gajillions of dollars that have already been pumped into marketing "HD" and "DVD", and the familiarity that goes with both.
I think this development is very telling, but its just a symptom not just of BluRay's failure, but the whole market for higher definition optical media.
I'm an Aussie but I've lived nearly my whole life in Singapore where electronic gadgets are not just a nice thing to have, they're almost status symbols, like most parts of affluent Asia I assume. When DVDs came along everyone was scrambling to get the latest devices, televisions and movie releases on the new format, but here we are in 2007 and only a handful of retailers here even know what BluRay and HDDVD players are, let alone sell them. In SINGAGPORE, one of the high tech capitals of the world. It's mind boggling.
So this Kmart in the United States story doesn't really surprise me. What I'm interested to know though is the overall market for high definition optical media not just "us" versus "them" Betamax style. Do many of you in the States own such players? Do you have many movies? Have you really paid much attention to it? Is it as bleak in your part of the world as it is in ours?
I think price is just one of many factors relating to slow adoption, and it's not the primary one.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
Blu-Ray and HD don't have enough capacity to store really good HDTV without overcompression. Everything still blurs during motion and pans. Then, when motion stops, enough data comes in for the decompressor to catch up. Yuck. That's why the demo content in the stores is either near-static scenes without camera pans, or something with so much action that you can't see the artifacts. Long, slow pans still suck. They suck for 24FPS film, too, but we have the technology to do better now.
Right now, the displays are better than the storage medium. You can buy 1080p flat screens without any problem. Some of them can even do 60FPS. We need 4x to 8x as much data on the storage medium to feed those big, fast screens properly.
This will probably happen after the NFL figures out some way to transmit football at 60FPS.
Not for the immediate futher, but don't rule them out yet... Sony has lost this kind of match before, back in the Beta vs VHS battle. Seems they forgot the lesson learned then.
Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"It means the lower cost and wider availability of a player, either player, will determine the outcome. Sony charged high prices and licenced their Betamax technology in the 70's, thus we had VHS as the eventual winner. Not learning from their prior mistake? No deja fubar?*
*fubar spelt that way for you anal types.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Rumor has it walmart will have the toshiba A2 hd-dvd for $98 on this friday
http://holiday.ri-walmart.com/?section=secret
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SPACEBALLS! or Serenity. or Firefly, or Frasier. or Scrooged! or Terminator. or Bladerunner. or M*A*S*H
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If that's not enough - here's a collection of 2 more words a piece: Groundhog Day, Battlestar Galactica, Blazing Saddles, True Lies. Total Recall. Office Space.
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Or 3 - The Blues Brothers (the original, not the sequel), Dead Like Me, 50 First Dates, Last Action Hero. School of Rock, Weekend at Bernies'
Not everyone is going to agree with everything on the list, but I'm sure most of us have stuff we'd like to see over and over, like Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle, 2 White Chicks, most of the James Bond movies, pretty much anything with Sean Connery (The Rock, for example).Huh. I can go down to Costco and pick up a name brand 42 inch 1080(P!) LCD HDTV that actually does have 1920x1080 pixels, for just over a thousand dollars. It has HDMI and all sorts of other connectors out the wazoo. HDTV is not out of the range of as many people as you think, and the situation has improved 100% over last year. When I go for a walk, I'm always seeing a new shiny, new wide screen monitor through someone's window, where there was none before.
It's a funny thing. When you become a landlord, you notice that people you think would be desperate enough not to want to pay $60/month for cable ALMOST ALWAYS DO--and they almost always prefer to neglect everything else but the cable TV bill. Back when I owned real estate, I used to cut my poorer tenants slack. I'd pay the water bill so they wouldn't let my lawn die. I pitched in on the electricity and gas because I couldn't see them living in the dark, shivering to death.
When I found out that oh, 80% percent (my experience) of the people in this situation in life would rather have deluxe fucking digital cable TV than running water, or heat... I lost all sympathy. I mean, this was at a time where I just got basic cable six months before, because it was like $3 more after I got the internet package from Comcast. I will not ever pay that much for freaking TV. So, anyway, I kicked their asses out and eventually sold my rentals. They now live in cold, dark closets of apartments and I'm much happier.
Lesson is, if people slowed down on the Cable, starbucks, restaurants and other money pits in their lives, a vast majority of them could afford nice things. Maybe it's not some strange coincidence that lots of people who aren't good with money end up the low person on the totem pole?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Fanboys have been lamenting this "stupid" "pointless" format war from the beginning but this just proves it has been wonderful from the consumer point of view. Had there been only one format, chances are we'd still have to pay $400-$500 minimum for players. Thank you, competition.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
It's hardly no surprise, since standalone Blu-ray player cost as much as a low-end PS3, which is also a gaming console and a media center. There is no reason for anyone to buy a standalone player, so there is virtually no market for the standalones.
Though they're specials, both Wal Mart and Best Buy are offering HD DVD players for $100.
Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player: $100, this Friday, Wal-Mart
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/01/toshiba-hd-a2-hd-dvd-player-100-this-friday-wal-mart/
Best Buy offers Toshiba HD-A2 for $100
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/01/best-buy-offers-the-toshiba-hd-a2-for-100-too-and-other-hd-dv/
Sunny
Be my Friend
1. I swear if I hear another stupid VHS/Betamax argument again I'm going to shoot someone (although it's not as bad to the stupid dumbasses who say, "The winner will be whoever the porn industry sides with!! Ignoring the fact that the porn industry played only a part in that war - it was NOT the deciding factor)
2. With everyone saying, "Oh man, a sub-100$ HD-DVD player, that's going to win the format war for sure!!" I think there is one thing that people are forgetting- HIGH-DEF is not yet for the masses. Less than half the people in the country have HDTV. That will change after Christmas, but it hasn't yet. It is a premium item. The people who do buy HDDVD/BLURAY are people who can afford the premium (typically). This HDDVD player is the "Coby"/knock-off brand of HDDVD player (Yes, I know Toshiba is not a knock-off brand..). This is a 1080i player, not 1080p. Many people can't tell the difference, but people who can afford HD typically care. Nobody spends 1000's of dollars on a system to add a 100$ player. Until HDTV's are cheaper and get near the 500-700 range for a 42" or above instead of around 1000-1400, then HD player prices will matter. This one player, (which is only going on sale for a few days, this is NOT a permanent price fix) is not going to win the format war. It will convince some people to get one and a few movies (despite that the 5 movies that come with it really suck donkey balls.) This will help the HDDVD camp for bragging rights for a few weeks, and their sales MIGHT top Bluray for a while, but this player will not "win" the format-war.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Also, you may have noticed that poor people are more likely to be smokers, which is a HUGE money sink. If the kids go to bed hungry, the electricity gets shut off and the car is repossessed, a smoker will STILL find money for a pack of cigarettes.
People can ruin their lives because of their vice, be it nicotine or TV.
I wonder when this battle over formats is going to end so I can actually start buying HD movies. Seriously, it's very annoying. I certainly don't want to invest in a player until a winner emerges. I don't do TV, can't stand almost all of it, but I like my movies and SF shows (Mmmm, River Tam in HD..), I'd rather like to have more than three episodes per disc too, whole seasons even. For that I would happily re-buy much of my collection.
As for data storage? Well I'd love to get with that, but again, there's no way I'm getting a writer until two things happen
1: Someone wins this spat.
2: Whoever wins decides they've tapped out the 'adopt early and pay big coin' brigade, and prices for writers drop to something reasonable.
Really, what's the source on this story? A Blog post on some unknown site by someone named "Technology Expert"? Hold a second while I create a blog, post that Walmart/Best Buy/Circuit City/etc decided to drop HDDVD then post it here for the editors to forward on.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Sure, I know that Blu-Ray can physically hold more data, but most people in the general public aren't going to care about that. I think Sony could have done so much more with the standard, but have honestly fallen short of my expectations. I would have hoped that both "next-gen" formats would have delivered that "wow this is cool" feeling. HD-DVD does it somewhat, but Blu-Ray seems to think that HD content is enough.
What do other dual format owners think? Is there some cool Blu-Ray specific feature that I've not seen yet?
I agree with you. I want HD movies, but am not going to buy anything till a format is chosen. I am not buying DVD's right now, because I don't want to buy them then replace them with HD versions once we have a winner. Of course, the MPAA probably thinks sales are down because people are pirating everything
With your second point in mind... Not everyone is going to go out and drop "1000's of dollars" for an HDTV. In fact, the masses will probably go out this holiday season and buy TVs mostly using 720p instead of 1080p. Why? Price and marketing. These TVs fall into that 500-700 dollar category that seems to be the sweet spot for most buyers. Also, that 500-700 dollar set also has the magic letters HDTV on it, which most people will just look for that instead of 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. The people that will be looking for these players at KMart will fall into this category.
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
This is a 1080i player, not 1080p.
I'm really getting tired of people who don't know what they're talking about making a big issue of 1080i vs. 1080p when it comes to a source device. Obviously, 1080i and 1080p are very different when it comes to a display. However, Any 1080p display worth its purchase price is going to be able to convert from 1080i to 1080p effectively losslessly. From Wikipedia: "Due to interlacing, 1080i has twice the frame-rate but half the resolution of a 1080p signal using the same bandwidth." In short, a 1080i signal and a 1080p signal contain the same data, just formatted differently. To go from 1080i to 1080p (this is simplified and doesn't account for various framerate differences), you take every two 1080i frames (540 lines each), weave them, and you have a 1080p frame.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The people have spoken. The bastards.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I haven't yet decided which format I'm going to choose for my upcoming home theater purchase, but reading reviews it is certainly evident that writers insert their own bias when reporting on the format war. This submitter is no exception.
For example the submitter writes: "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores ... They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being". The last sentence implies that they may at any time stop selling the PS3 as well. The original article however states "Of course, Kmart will continue to sell the Playstation 3, which includes a Blu-ray player", with the 'of course' implying that it's obvious that dropping the PS3 would not even be a consideration. The difference in perspective is obvious.
Now lets say the the submitter was an actual journalist in a mainstream publication. You could then easily imagine other people picking up on that inference and stating 'K-Mart drops Blu-Ray - considers dropping PS3 as well" or something along those lines.
For all submitters, if you are going to post something, keep your own agenda out of it.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I've been a part of this community for quite some time and I often contribute stories. Only rarely do they ever get accepted. I've noticed that the stories that make it to the front page tend to have two qualities - they are sensationalist and they ask rhetorical questions. I decided to try and see if adding those qualities to my submissions would work. Hence, I added the "they'll keep selling PS3s for now" bit for the melodrama and then I added the required rhetorical question. Sure enough, it got accepted.
On the plus side, format wars that make people afraid to buy DVDs are good for Netflix's business. I know I started using them when i got sick of the idea of buying an "obsolete" format.
(Especially when DVDs I had already bought started coming out in "super criterion extended bonus editions" 4-5 years later)
Good job refuting
"Many people can't tell the difference, but people who can afford HD typically care"
but in fact it's already contrafactual on its face. Perhaps 1% of ppl in the market for these devices can tell the difference and care. The other 99% will buy what the salesperson at the big box store tells them is the best.
Which means that more will buy the more expensive 1080p stuff, but not for the reason GP states.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
What frame rate are you assuming the 1080p content is in? Standard formats have only one frame rate for 1080i (30 frames/sec, 60 fields/sec, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates) but have 3 choices for 1080p (24, 30, and 60, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates). For content originating in 24 fps motion picture film, or its digital equivalent, encoding it as 24 fps onto the disc is best.
If you are converting 1080i30/60 to 1080p60, that works fine. But the source material may not be in that format. It might be in 1080p24. Upconverting that to 1080i30/60 would add the motion judder artifact. That can be easily fixed if the upconversion were to any progressive frame rate. Fixing it after interlacing is next to impossible (the weaving together method doesn't fix judder).
What we really need is a player that either leaves the content unconverted (e.g. send it as 1080p24 to the display) or upconverts to something a multiple of the 24 fps (1080p48 or 1080p72 ... non-standards, unfortunately). More likely we'll see upconversion to 1080p60 from players in the future, and then TVs will have to have "judder correction" or "3:2 film correction". But it would be better to just pass the video from the player to the display in the 24 fps format. An LCD display can simply update pixels at that rate and you won't see flicker anyway. Other display technology would have to engage the conversion circuits.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, it isn't. You must not have seen the terms 1080p30 and 1080p60 before. 1080p30 is "standard".
From here:
1080i30/60/90p14326542 1878367 fish monkey judder correction 1080p62.3 3:2interlacing together method judder 24fps cannot update pixels in content originating plus 1000/1000 24, 30, 60.
Blah blah blah, who gives a shit?
How's the picture look to Joe Sixpack? Nice and clear with warm colors? That wins over the techno-babble jabber malarkey.
No, you're seeing motion blur because film cameras have a 1/48th of a second exposure time. That same blur on frames with high motion was seen in the theater, and on the negative.
My video compression blog
"Forward looking" is, IMO, kind of silly. By the time your "forward looking" becomes "standard" (or even close to standard), there will be much better devices, for much cheaper prices. "Forward looking" is just ego-saving, elitist version of "early adopter". I'm very glad for many early adopters like yourself, actually. You guys get to experience the bumps, hiccups, and various other issues and iron them out for folks like me who, will eventually spend 1/10 what you paid and have a much better system than what you bought AND you'll end up buying the same system that we bought just so you can be current and have a reasonable working system in the process while early adopting the next big thing to prepare it for us.
Here's to you, Mr. Early Adopter. (Real Men of Genius)
You take the early systems with their bugs, incompatibilities, and problems and live with them and deal with them just so you can 'have it' before anyone else. (Yeah, I got it and you don't!)
All the while, petting your ego and inflating your self esteme so you can feel better about yourself and elevating yourself above the unwashed masses. (This new device makes me a better person!)
After all, you know that directing someone's attention to your new shiny gadget is easy, and it distracts them from finding out about your secret about your junk size. (Awwww... don't look there!)
So, here's to you... Mr. Early Adopter. (Real Men of Geniusssssss)
It would appear sir, that it is you who does not understand the issues here.
1080i means the signal is interlaced. What is interlacing? Put briefly; back in the 1930's, you simply could not transmit as much data to a television back in those days. You were very limited in what you could transmit reliably given the transmitters, receivers, and noisy equipment of the day. In modern language, we might say that bandwidth was very limited for television.
Like all forms of moving pictures, television requires a fairly high framerate to give the illusion of a continuously moving images from what is just a sequence of still frames. But because of the restricted bandwidth, more frames per second means your frames must have less resolution. So the 1930s engineers were seemingly at an impasse.
Enter interlacing. Instead of transmitting a full ~25 frames every second, you transmit ~25 half frames every second. One one frame you draw the odd numbered lines of pixels, and on the next you draw the even lines, and so on. Because CRT televisions used glowing phosphor which had a "fade" out time, the two frames would meld into one without the viewer noticing. It was a good solution given the technology of the day, and served the industry well for many years.
So 1080i signals are inherently of a much, much lower quality than either 1080p signals, or even 720p signals. This is because they transmit half frames, and try as you might you're never, ever going to be able to mesh those frames into one another seamlessly. 1080i is already a lossy signal, so saying that it converts "losslessly" to 1080p is equivalent to saying that a 320x240 signal can be scaled "losslessly" to a 640x480 signal. It's true, but your avoiding the main issue.
Yes, given the same bandwidth, a 1080i signal can transmit just as much data as a 1080p signal. So can any signal for that matter, regardless of format. But the reality is, 99.999% of 1080i signals will be transmitting at the same framerate as their 1080p equivalents, i.e. the 1080i signal will be transmitting less data and hence will be a lower quality one. Even if it transmits the same data, the signal will still have been put through an interlacing shredder, and will not be worth the money you're paying for it.
We're now in the year 2007. Simply put, bandwidth is for nothing. On top of that, our newer televisions don't use CRTs anymore, meaning that interlacing tends to show up quite noticeably, making the picture look awful. So why then do we have 1080i as a HD option?
Hell if I know.
Interlacing was a smart idea in the 1930's. In 2007, with digital framebuffers, LCD TVs, and high quality cabling, interlacing is simply an embarrassment. 1080i is simply a high resolution embarrassment.
May the Maths Be with you!
You may be right about them not knowing about HD sources, but I will say this: Our HD TV produces the best analog Standard Def TV picture I have ever seen. Of course the SD/LowD pic does not compare to the HD pic, but it is still much better than that of our last analog TV.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Are you sure that's 100% correct?
I was under the impression that CRTs required 50/60 (PAL/NTSC) non-interlaced frames per second to avoid unpleasant levels of flickering, but that there was only enough bandwidth for 25/30- which looked bad- so they sent fifty (or sixty) half-frames instead.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Wrong again for the same reasons I stated above. Interlaced formats send twice as many half-frames as the same material would have sent full-frames. Again, the grandparent was correct, the same data gets sent, just formatted differently. Actually, there is an exception, which is the 50p and 60p frame rates because there is no equivalent 100i or 120i rates in interlaced; however, I don't think anyone is broadcasting or releasing any material in this format, most likely because there are very few cameras that can capture in this format and it would just kill bandwidth and storage anyway.
I'm not familiar with the exact details of the circuitry that does this, but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere as destructive as you make it out to be, if it's destructive at all. Basically, I believe TVs treat each individual line as a discrete piece of information, so what order you send them in should make no difference.