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Blu-ray Player Prices Hit 2008 Highs
An anonymous reader writes "HD DVD is almost gone and Blu-ray prices are already on their way up. TG Daily went through average retail prices of some of the popular Blu-ray players and found that you should expect to pay at least $400 for an entry-level Blu-ray player, while you could get a player for less than $330 in February. It really should not be a surprise for all of us, but it is interesting to see how quickly retail adjusted to the new situation and increased prices."
by not buying the now overpriced gear...
Meanwhile, there are rumors that once the PS3's start rolling out with 45nm CPUs and GPUs that they will drop $100 in price.
$400 for an entry-level player, or $400 for the PS3?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I would have thought the Blu-Ray group would have liked faster adoption after the demise of HD-DVD but it seems by keeping prices high they might end up slowing themselves down. What would be even more ironic is if the Blu-Ray group collapses themselves in a few years due to lack of demand. That would be a good laugh.
Potential competition from HD-DVD helped keep prices low to attract consumers. HD-DVD has lost so there is less incentive to keep the prices low. Once there are more manufacturers producing Blu-ray players then prices will start to drop again.
Market forces at work
ACK NAK RST
If people continue to purchase DVD players (which are easily under $100), the Blu-ray player prices may drop after a few months. For many people, the quality of DVDs are just fine and they don't have the massive television displays to support them anyway. The cynic in me thinks we're seeing a price hike so stores get the cash from all the early adopters who bought HD-DVD and now feel obligated to buy a Blu-ray player.
At 400 bucks, why not just drop an extra 60 for a PS3? Perhaps Sony has a good marketing strategy, make all the other BR players so damned expansive that people wont mind dropping the extra dough for a game system even if they don't want/need it.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I'm not really surprised but this, but not because HD-DVD is dead.
/.), what percentage of TV owners even OWN an HDTV that could benefit from a next-gen format?
Blu-Ray recently add the "Profile 1.1" and "Profile 2.0" specs to their list (and yes, to all you HD-DVD supporters playing at home, Profile 2.0 does FINALLY bring Blu-Ray to feature parity with HD-DVD). Also, as we've been reminded time and again (especially by posters on
Once the specs have settled a little, and as HDTV adoption increases, I'd expect to see economies of scale kick in (as opposed to the price war going on between the BD camp and the HD-DVD camp).
Something else to keep in mind though, is that the PS3 is probably going to be leading the charge in the price war for the next few years.
If $400 is the average price for a BD player, then the $400 PS3, as a current "Profile 1.1" and guaranteed future "Profile 2.0" player (according to Sony's press release from last years E3), makes it a steal as the best priced (and more "future-proof") unit. On the other hand, so long as the PS3 is competing with the XBox 360, they can not keep the price that much higher than their competitor, and they MUST include the Blu-Ray Drive, since PS3 games are shipped on BDs.
It'll be interesting to follow the market as a whole as the PS3 ages into its life cycle, the price drops, and HDTV adoption increases.
(I know at least 5 people in the past week that have finally decided to look into HDTVs that didn't know anything about it. Yes this is anecdotal evidence, but its more people than I have personally seen looking at getting an HDTV at a given time.)
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This may reflect badly on them in the long run.
The price has little to do with cost, but more to do with what you can get away with.
Ultimately making the consumer more pessemistic
G
This monopoly is so much better for the consumer.
Yeah, because we all know this evil DVD monopoly drove DVD player
prices to insane heights...
Seriously, this is basic supply and demand at work (more would-'ve-bought HD-DVD
buyers now go for BluRay) and will certainly improve over a probably rather short time.
this probably wont happen, but:
What if by declaring hd-dvd dead it causes hd-dvd to become more popular than blu-ray?
By this I mean, the prices of drives are dropping because they are getting rid of them. The movies, too. At the same time, blu-ray is going up.
Will a lot of people even know that hd-dvd is dead? They will just see how cheap it is.
If this were timed right, hd-dvd could hit a critical mass very quickly. Yes they'd lose a bunch of money on the current supplies, but that's going to happen anyway. If at the right time they could resurect it and keep the prices way below blu-ray they could make a comeback. In the mean time they don't really have to waste money on advertising etc.
Myself, I would buy an hd-dvd burner and media right now if the prices were really low, just for storage purposes. They should continue to sell them for pcs for storage purposes.
Just a crazy idea. And what a coup it would be...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Monopoly? Last I heard, virtually every major CE manufacturer with the exception of Toshiba was competing for the blu ray money in your pocket. Even Toshiba has a 50% stake in a company producing blu ray drives so I'm sure they come out of their period of mourning soon enough.
Prices will drop through competition and economies of scale.
With the format war over and uncertainty removed, retailers are starting to sell these things close to their MSRP again. I shouldn't worry though. More and more models are appearing from more and more manufacturers including no-names so the prices are going to head south.
Not that this is a bad thing - it will help to correct the imbalances in the US economy far more than bleating about NAFTA or whatever other nonsense is coming out of your politicians at the moment...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is an utterly foolish move by manufacturers and retailers, because it presumes that HD-DVD was the *only* obstacle to widespread adoption. In fact, Blu-Ray may have won the battle vs. HD-DVD, but it is far from winning the war. Digital download is becoming increasingly popular, and many consumers are just fine with their current DVD's.
Some advice to the Blu-Ray camp: You still haven't convinced us to buy, and raising prices ain't gonna help things.
I was buying blu-ray right and left in late 2007. Since Feb '08 I have not bought a single title. Why? Prices of media jumped beyond my threshold and I went back to DVD.
I find it hard to buy titles like "No Country for Old Men" for $26.00-29.99 on Blu-Ray when the same title can be picked up for less than $14 at Target on DVD. Another gripe is high prices on back-catalog titles I already own on DVD. Sorry, I will not buy a $26+ BR title when I have already purchased the same title on DVD two or more years ago.
When retailers start aggressively pricing media again, I'll go back to buying the format. Otherwise upscaled DVD looks quite good on my PS3.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
...player and says "Why would I want to buy that?".
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Rightly said. The raise will certainly be temporary. In a couple of months Blu-ray competition will drive the prices again down.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Calling Sony's victory with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD a "monopoly" is like saying Sirius' proposed merger with XMSR is a monopoly.
No sir, I don't buy it. With as many entertainment and content distribution options completing in the Audio and Visual domains... no one company can ever establish a monopoly. The only thing that can happen is the companies become entrenched with technology that isn't adopted, supported, or interoperated with and that leads to business failure.
And yes, Sony bought the format war with hundreds of millions of potentially well-spend bribes, but their is no way for them to bribe there way to some kind of vertically-integrated "entertainment" monopoly. It would cost too much. I am not worried, unless they make a play at merging with Comcast or something.
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Please. Do you consider DVDs to be a monopoly? How about CDs? A standard format is not a "monopoly", not unless the format is proprietary.
Here's what's going on: both Blu Ray and HD-DVD players were being sold at a minimal profit — a loss, even — because both sides were trying to grab market share. End of format war, end of need to grab market share.
The problem has been that everybody with any brains has been waiting for the format war to end before plunking down their hard-earned cash. When consumers don't buy, sales are low, and when sales are low, there are no economies of scale. No economies of scale means high manufacturing costs, and thus high retail costs — unless the product is being sold at a loss.
So of course prices go up. But that's a short term thing. Right now, every consumer electronics company on the planet is gearing up to manufacture Blu Ray players by the million. When you manufacture something on that scale (especially electronics, where the fundamental technology is subject to Moore's Law) prices crash.
In a year or two, Blu Ray players will be as cheap as DVD players are now.
I have both players, so I've been soaking up HD-DVDs dirt cheap since Toshiba threw in the towel.
One thing that has been observed since Toshiba's decision is that sales of players and movies have SKYROCKETED, and Toshiba has been reported to be reconsidering their decision.
This war may not be over just yet...
Yeah, because we all know this evil DVD monopoly drove DVD player
This time its different because the blu-ray consortium is not giving licenses to tom-dick-harry shop in china to make cheap players. So unlike the DVD, this time around we wont be seeing cheap DVD players. I still remember that it was some Chinese brand (apex?) which broke the $100 barrier for DVD-players and became the largest selling dvd player right behind Sony. With tighter licensing restrictions, thats not going to happen this time around with Blu-ray payers
If your statement is true, and I'm going to assume it is, this means we also won't see a huge blu-ray adoption. The VHS to DVD format adoption is easily the fastest I've ever seen. Faster than LPs to tape, faster than tape to CD. in fact, I remember buying my first CD player in about 1989. CDs had been mainstream since what, 82, but seven years later a good player was still $300? It took a long time for the CD to completely take over the market, mostly because the players were expensive.
If the studios are smart, and I think they are, the prices of blu-ray players will only be high for the next 6 months or so. After that, the studios will subsidize their production. The only way people are going to buy ANOTHER new copy of that old movie they love is if the player is cheap. The best way for the studios to make money is to get those players in the hands of the end users.
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I would say that this has nothing to do with monopoly and a lot to do with the prices going back up to what they should be, with the cost of technology and all. It takes a LOT of processing power to decrypt and play an HD disk so it is understandable that at this point the hardware would be expensive. also, there are a lot of R&D costs to recover that were spent in developing the blu-ray players. over time as the technology gets cheaper and more units get sold, prices will go down with competition.
Make it up in volume. That's the ticket.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Though declared "Dead", the body is still warm. And you'd think that HD-DVD would be the natural successor to the DVD drives for PC's because they share the same filesystem, and HD-DVD drives are completely backwards compatible with CD and DVD formats. While Blu-Ray players can be made compatible with those formats, not all players are. At least some BR players on the market couldn't read standard CD's, for instance. Since Microsoft's Xbox 360 uses an HD-DVD drive, you might be able to get them to push the standard for PC drives.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Don't Forget about the famed Apex AD-600a! http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/21/1233235
http://www.nerd-out.com/darrenk/600/history.htm
It was the model to have (with the correct firmware revision) with its famous "Engineering Menu" which allowed the "Macrovision" encoding to be *disabled* and you could change it to *any* region code as many times as you desired.
DRM sucks. This Apex model *Proved* that fact to me with its 'usefulness' back in 2000 (when I took off work early to go buy one from Circuit City). It's now 8 Years old and still kicking! Good Times.
Now that blu-ray is the standard, more companies are willing to take a gamble and produce expensive luxury models. The average price will be higher even though the same lower-cost models are available at the same price. It's just that now more companies are putting weight on high-end options as well as offering affordable options. Prior to this point in the market, the focus was on adoption. Now it's on adoption as well as catering to those who are ready to invest heavily in the platform.
Twinstiq, game news
It's not like the US doesn't already ignore NAFTA when it doesn't work to their advantage (see Canadian softwood lumber).
HD-DVD (which arrived at retail in mid 2006) lost because the 360 (which arrived at retail in late 2005) didn't include it as standard? Putting an HD-DVD drive into the 360 at the time of launch may have been an impossibility due to the maturity level of the technology. It certainly would have been a financial impossibility for the price, which was considered high at the time. Had the 360 been $100 more at launch than it was (which would've also meant MS would be losing substantially more money per console), adoption would have been much slower than it was. Microsoft is more concerned with winning the console war than fighting in a storage medium war. Offering the HD-DVD addon was merely a ploy to slow PS3 adoption and possibly hurt Sony. What might have been more effective would be if they had offered a $200 Bluray addon instead of the HD-DVD offering. Thus, the sales case for the PS3, when the games library was so small, would no longer have included BR. BR is the only reason I bought my PS3. Having the option of playing a few exclusive games at some point is nice, but not an argument for buying yet another expensive console when I already own a 360 that will be able to play 95% of the games the PS3 can (at least of the ones I'm interested in).
Oh, I ahve a feeling you will see this article again in 6 months...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There has been an annyoing meme on /. recently among a small, but noticable minority, namely: the free market KING and the goivernment should SFTU and GBTW so to speak.
This is a classic example of a free market failure. One player paid an enourmous amount of money ($400 million) to kill the other player. Now that the other player is as good as gone, the prices have risen.
This is an excellent example where the free market fails: corporate collusion destroyed it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, but what makes you think the BR consortium is going to suddenly start dishing out licences to the Chinese knockoff shops? I don't know what they charge, but even if they do loosen their exclusivity, I don't see the price of a licence being practical for cheap manufacturing to make a difference. They're really that paranoid about losing control.
This format (I'm not going to call it a standard) is much more tightly controlled than DVD or the CD.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Your ideas were tried in 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It didn't cause the Great Depression on its own, but it made it a whole lot worse.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I can see a difference between 600 and 1200 DPI on a printed page, but I can't see any difference between 1600 and 2000 DPI.
But I don't think it's DPI that really defines the limit here;
According to http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html there are about 120 million rods in the human eye.
Even though they aren't evenly distributed, I'd hazard that a 12k x 10k display will be close enough to human perception that further "improvements" in resolution won't be discernible.
We aren't there yet, but it doesn't seem all that far off either.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I looked at the graph, it looks like a whole lot of nothing. Minor retail fluctuations with a blip up after the holidays. I would expect that of most products.
I thought I would check one of the high marks they are using as Evidence:
I looked at the Sharp BDHP20U listed as having jumped to $440. I checked amazon where it is show a LIST PRICE of $399 and selling price of $350. Only $90 different? Maybe Amazon is an outlier? Dell $329, Every retailer I have heard of was under $400.
The only number higher were listing of something called "storefront"? with a price of $100 more than list??
Anyway even if the graph was correct, it looks like a whole lot of nothing, but to top it, the data itself seems suspect. Have a look for yourself.
Bottom line nothing to see here. Just another attempt to stir up the dead war for TG page hits.
Definitely*. Try producing a DVD player in the US without paying a lot of money to the DVD copy control association and agreeing to implement their DRM. It won't take you long to hear from their lawyers. It only a few days for ME to hear from them back when I hosted some open source DVD stuff on my web server.
* I'm assuming you're talking about commercial, consumer video DVD stuff here since that's what the whole thread is about.
I'm not sure what you're implying by the "anti-PS3 crowd"? That only die-hard PS3 fans are technically savvy enough to want an HD player? Or is it just a troll remark? The market is made up of a lot of different people on ALL sides of the console front; some for gaming, some for the overall capabilities of a console and, with the war being over, a BD player first and a game console second.
Most of my time is still playing PC games but I also have an Xbox and have no interest in a PS3 even for the BluRay. I have a lot of interest in BluRay but not through a PS3 or the "new" pricing scheme that they've seemed to now drop on consumers for stand-alone players. I'll bid my time and hopefully Microsoft releases a BD player at some point in the upcoming months as has been the rumor.
The dispute is over hardwood,
The dispute is about softwood. This can be confirmed in about two minutes on Google.
and NAFTA clearly shouldn't apply when you are destroying the environment to undercut your competitors.
Do you really think that the US was imposing duties for environmental reasons? Seriously?
Can't argue with you about the government's action re: the preservation of the spotted owl though. I'm not a big fan of North America's lack of respect for the environment as a whole. Then again, I could be doing a hell of a lot more personally.
Off the top of my head you can buy players from Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Denon, Marantz and Pioneer. Since I have no idea where you live or where you buy your electronics from I can't comment whether you can find them in bricks & mortar stores or not. I expect most dedicated AV stores would stock several models. I expect stores like Best Buy etc. do too or will before long.
Possibly the most pointless flame war on the internet, right after the hams with "morse code vs. no code", is this HD DVD vs. Blu Ray. Both will play a HD disc. Both are locked down with DRM. Both solidify the current system of "we distribute, you bu¥, and no copying", just like 1979. HDMI-HDCP are far from a great idea...technically....but tech is not the idea...locking in the distribution system is. Why do you think each side fought for the monopoly ? Just this reason...the ability to dictate price, and for the endless residuals for the IP in the player. A standard DVD, on my 50 inch 1080 set, still looks good enough that I don't feel the need to run out and buy the HD disc. Also, has anyone noticed the raft of second tier films the studios are slowly releasing to get maximum bounce out of the old catalog to desperate buyers ? Really...people care about this ??