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HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba
Hellburner writes "Hoping to stop the inevitable, Toshiba has slashed the price of entry-level HD DVD players to $150 — down from the previous $300. 'It's a half-empty, half-full moment for retailers, who could see a sales boost at the same time that some may be faced with price matching from holiday sales ... The theory: play up the acceptance by consumers who have already paid for HD DVD versus those who get it with something else like a gaming console, get more players out there--and dare studios to ignore those consumers. In addition to the sales cuts, Toshiba will launch major initiatives, including joint advertising campaigns with studios.'"
We've had to contend with +r and -r for dvd burning and I honestly can't tell you anything about them other than +r seems to work better with my equipment. My burner can handle both and I'm assuming if both of these formats can stay viable long enough, burners, players, and even the game consoles will eventually support both. MS is already on record stating the 360 would be able to support a BR player due to it's current high def player being external. A lot of people bitched that it wasn't included like the BR drive was with the PS3 but I think in the end they made a smart decision to go external. If the format does fail then they can easily switch and probably a lot of the people that have bought drives would buy again to get the new format.
I really don't care who wins out or if we end up with both. I'm sick of needing to replace my movie collection every however many years. I had a crap load of vhs. I now have a library of films on dvd. Am I going to replace everything with the media du jour? No. I have too much money invested in the shiny discs I already have and I don't see those going away for a very long time. Most people I know don't even have a high def tv yet and according to the story yesterday regarding the uber def format the Japanese are working on, why should I upgraded to BR or HDDVD only to have to upgraded again to support the crazy resolutions of yet another format in 2015?
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Because it's still a hacker's game, instead of a general public game. 'True' hackers display their work in the 'scene' and not for public consumption. It's people on the fringes of the 'scene' that release all the stuff to the public.
If you think Bluray hasn't been cracked, take a look at the newsgroups and how many bluray rips there are. HDDVD, too, mind you.
So why are there no stories about BR being cracked? Because nobody's talking about it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc. Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?
Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.
I remember looking at HD-DVD burners around the same time. It was about $600 for the Blu-Ray internal drive and it was about $1200 for an external firewire HD-DVD burner. Late spring/early summer 2007 I went to look at getting an HD-DVD burner as wedding season started. I figured the price of HD-DVD burners had dropped to the point where I could make a buck by offering the same service to others still not wanting to invest a $1000 in a burner, but still needed HD-DVD work. I could purchase the blank media at staples (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD), which is saying something because it's a rural college town, not a big city.
So I went out shopping online and found HD-DVD drives for computers, but I couldn't find a single burner. I went to a couple specialist companies that sell high end editing equipment, and they didn't have any Pro-sumer grade HD-DVD burners (they had the high end stuff). Come to find out, the low-end/consumer/prosumer grade HD-DVD burners simply didn't exist. They weren't available.
That told me something right there. When people asked what format to buy this past christmas, I still said, "I think digital downloads is going to be the way HD-content is delivered to TV's. Whether that's Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon/Cable/Tivo/Sat. I don't know. My advice is to wait. But if you have to buy one, go Blu-Ray. I can burn Blu-Ray discs, I can't even find an HD-DVD burner.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
the first post i've seen by someone that actually sounds like they have kids. the DVD player in the car was a godsend on a recent 1800 mile round trip drive. i also would lose the ability to back up that expensive dvd. standard practice for me is to make a copy of kids movies for 2 reasons. 1 if it gets scratched i dont have to buy another, 2 i can strip out all the ads,previews,warnings and other crap. put it in, movie plays. it can take minutes to actually get the damn movie started on some discs thanks to previews you can't skip or FF thru (i'm looking at you disney). when the kids are screaming that seems like eternity...