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Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold?
Velcroman1 writes "My VCR is stashed in a closet, right next to a couple of CD-ROM players, a laser disc player, and other forgotten electronics. Is my Blu-ray player about to join them? Blu-ray really hasn't caught on — and probably never will. 'I'm surprised DVDs have continued to hang on,' said King, referring to the fact that player sales of over 20 million units in the US last year were pretty much evenly split between DVD and Blu-ray models. Blu-ray discs and players are clearly superior to DVDs, offering more features and a better picture overall. So why haven't shoppers been impressed?"
Because "regular price" for many blu-ray movie is $29.99 compaired to $17.99 for a DVD. The only times I buy blu-ray over DVD are for action movies that I really enjoyed (and that the improved picture quality is actually noticeable) or deep discount sales when I can get them for under $15.
My biggest problem with blu-ray early on was that the first generation of players was awful. They were slow as Christmas (WAY slower than the first generation of DVD players) for one thing. Newer players are considerably faster and come with a lot more features. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that blu-ray discs still come with forced trailers (way more common with blu-rays than with DVD's) from most studios (Universal and a few others being notable exceptions).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Honestly, the quality is too good - You can see the wizard behind the curtain. Real life example: My geeks friends and I were all standing around watching Iron man 2 on a super huge LCD screen at best buy. It was the scene where Tony escapes his captors in the clunky MKI armor. We all noted that the suit looked like plastic, not metal. That you could see where the joints didn't quite connect. In short, the illusion was shattered. I haven't bought a blue ray video since. (I have a PS3, I own a few blueray films that I got for the extra features - But I prefer to watch plain old DVDs.)
...I have a home theater but there are several reasons why people aren't interested.
(1)If you don't have a home theater and a giant screen to display movies on, you probably couldn't care less about the difference in quality between DVD and BluRay (plus, I've seen some crap BluRay transfers that were no improvement over DVD.)
(2)Until mini-vans start coming with BluRay players by default, my wife will continue to buy DVDs to zombify the kids on car trips.
(3)My personal hatred of BluRay - Taking several minutes to startup due to the DRM and HDCP handshaking, key updating, communication, et cetera.
It is utterly ridiculous that putting a DVD in my Sony BluRay player versus a BluRay means a playback difference of 3 minutes (and I have a fast BluRay player.) Note that some BluRay Discs do not exhibit this behavior but all are still sloooooow compared to DVD.
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The article states that Blu-ray player shipments are about to outstrip plain DVD. It's not like Blu-ray has failed. It *has* taken a while to capture the people who are still moving to HD. It *may* have a problem in competition with streaming (if you live in an area where there's sufficient bandwidth). I suppose the biggest issue is: will people continue to want to "own" content in physical form? The case is still out on that one (and even a minority position might be a very large market). Personally I think Blu-ray is still the only way to go if you've got/built a home theater.
There's another difference which makes DVDs more easily playable.
:).
You can easily buy _cheap_ multi-region DVD players.
It's still not easy to find cheap multi zone Blu-ray players.
I know some guy who buys lots of original stuff (especially shelves of anime) and he lives in NZ.
The trouble is most english sub-titled bluray anime releases are in the wrong zone for NZ blu-ray players!
So he had to go to a different country to buy a bluray player and take it back... I told him he shouldn't support such idiocy, but he just had to buy one.
Who gets hurt by this bullshit? Good customers like him. Those people downloading MKVs aren't hurt