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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
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?
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?
WTF are you talking about? There's plenty of "content"; Just go to your local super electronics store and see for yourself. Every major studio release in the last 5 or 6 months is coming out on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray or both. What's more, there's a world of difference in quality if you actually own an HD TV. An up converting standard DVD player does a good job, but the difference with HD-DVD / Blu-Ray is definitely noticeable.
The backers of HD-DVD are being far more intelligent from a marketing stand point than Sony+Blue-Ray. Cheaper players, Combo discs (Standard DVD + HD-DVD in the same package) and they have better penetration into the markets that actually matter (Wal-Mart, for example).
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.
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'll be a slower adoption than we saw with DVDs, but considering that we're approaching the point where a HD-DVD player isn't considerably more than the cost of a decent regulat DVD player, I have a feeling that consumers looking to buy a new DVD player will be willing to jump for the extra $50 to get a HD-DVD unit.
Rumor is that we'll be seeing players costing between $100 and $150 in the next month, which is almost low enough to be in the 'Impulse Buy' range. Because HD-DVD players are of course backward compatible, and typically offer some sort of upscaling, they'll sell enough of these things to consumers who aren't even particularly interested in buying HD-DVD discs so that there's not nearly as much of a chicken/egg situation between players and discs. For now, there's enough content to get by and make it worthwhile.
So, no. We won't see a massive rush to upgrade to HD-DVD. However, players should begin to slowly seep into the marketplace, and after a few years, it'll be 'mainstream'. HD-capable TVs are also becoming increasingly common these days, and I'd bet that consumers shelling out money for a new TV will also spring for a HD-DVD player, considering the low price.
Unless sony drops the price of their Blu-Ray equipment, Blu-Ray is dead in the water. Have they already forgotten BetaMax?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
Yeah, but video on demand isn't going to happen for another 10 or more years. Remember, 1080p is something like 40mbps. Comcast currently tops of at around 6mbps. Just imagine the bandwidth comcast would need for even 20% of it's customers all streaming 40mbps on a Friday night for 2 hours. They would also need a multitude of servers that could handle streaming all that data out.
The per-user cost of the routers, servers, and set-top boxes has got to be well over twice as much as a blu-ray or HD-DVD player is now. I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not there yet and I don't see cable companies as smart enough to figure it out.
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
Does that mean it's going to win? No. But it certainly doesn't sound like it's losing.
Are you %*#(ing serious?
Video downloads on the 'net are typically offered at VGA resolution, if not less, and are almost always compressed to hell.
iTunes does it. Netflix does it, and as far as I know, so does Amazon.
If you want a comparison of just how much bigger a 1080p image is than a typical VGA download, look here. Oh, and the smallest box in that image is more than twice the size of a YouTube video.
An HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc holds something like 20-40GiB of high-res video. 99% of broadband connections today cannot stream that much that quickly, and even a download would take prohibitively long, and be incredibly cumbersome to store due to the huge size of the files. I'd daresay that the internet backbone couldn't handle those sort of loads even if HD streaming became commonplace and there was broadband connectivity to support it.
Streaming's cool, but removable storage is going to have the edge in the video market for the foreseeable future if it's HD we're talking about.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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
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.
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
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.