CHEAP BR Player

ben62670

I-SIG wrote: »

Thanks, guys. I just thought that since BR won the HD battle there was a chance for dedicated BRaudio stuff and I might look pretty smart not having gotten into SACD.

Wes

I hope you are right. I only have about a dozen SACD's, so a BR with a good SACD analog section would really be nice:) By the time BR burners drop in price enough I might jump on it. I like my stuff being able to be backed up!
Ben

apphd

Looking at the activity in this thread it looks like there are a number of "entry level" (lack of a better name) players out there now <$250. Is anyone seeing the price of discs going down? Will this Christmas be the one that gets prices down enough to make this format more mainstream/in everyhome? There seems to be a lot of High Dev TVs in the home mostly being fed cable, sat., and broadcast. (I know there are a lot of BRD players in homes, but I still think the number of HDTVs far out numbers them). Just looking to see what everyone else thinks.:D

cheddar

Last year, in the middle of the format war, titles would release at their full retail price (over 30 bucks per disk) at Best Buy. You might have been able to get a new release blu-ray or an older title at amazon for 27-28 dollars if you were lucky. Of course you had a lot of bogo sales. But these bogos were specific to certain studios. So if you liked Sony releases, you had a bogo just about every other week when new releases for hd-dvd came out. Disney was also pretty good. But Warner was probably a distant 3rd, Fox an even worse 4th especially considering they were a blu-ray exclusive studio. So basically you could get titles like 5th element in just about every bogo, but you had to wait and hope that you could get titles you wanted especially if they weren't part of Sony or Disney/Buena Vista.

Now, retailers across the board from Best Buy to Circuit City seem to be pricing new releases around $24 dollars completely ignoring retail price. And amazon seems to have close to 400 older (and not so older -- I am legend, etc. I am legend and batman begins were actually new releases below $20) titles priced under $20. Many at $15. And some even at the $10-12 level. When a sale comes along, it's usually a buy 2 get 1 free at amazon instead of a bogo, but because average prices have dropped so much, you can still get great deals. And we're not even at Black Friday yet.

Back in the format war days, TOTAL sales of blu-ray and hd-dvd disks had a hard time breaking 1% of total disk sales (DVD included). With the recent iron man release, 1 in 5 disks sold at all retailers was a blu-ray. Online, it was closer to half of all disks. And at amazon, the blu-ray actually OUT SOLD the DVD version of the disk.

The Dark Knight won't even release until December. But for the past two weeks, the Dark Knight BLU-RAY pre-order was the number one seller on amazon even competing against iron man, indiana jones, and sleeping beauty which were actually available. And that includes all DVD versions. Right now half of the top 10 best sellers of all disks on amazon are blu-ray. And 4 out of 5 of those blu-rays are out selling their dvd counterparts. Amazon is certainly reaping profits from blu-ray sales and they have every incentive to engage in healthy competition with brick and mortar shops, continuing to under cut or match their promotions and regular prices, going into Christmas. Likewise, if the brick and mortar shops are going to prevent amazon from running away with blu-ray market share, they're going to have to drive down their blu-ray prices too as we've seen with their price match on blu-ray new releases.

I still think it's a no brainer to just wait a month for the Christmas season to hit. Then just keep your eyes open, there should be plenty of good deals coming along in both hardware and software for blu-ray.