Blu Ray over/under $


Sony announced the release of a blu ray DVD player for this summer along with some disc releases. What's your guess of how much it will cost upon intial release? How much would you pay to get one or would you get one at all?
maineiac
I agree that Play Station three rocks- I saw it myself. It gives a superior gaming experience than xbox 360 IMO as a truely disinterested third party. PS3 is a better product and obviously is a key Sony/Blu Ray advantage.

Still, I think the HD-DVD/blu-Ray issue is not so easy to determine a winner. With a split on movie titles and cheaper price points on movies and players, HD-DVD cannot be counted out easily. Lets see what happens...
Just back from CES myself, saw no apparent quality difference between hd-bluray. However anybody I talked to promoting hd-dvd was very defensive sounding while the blu-ray folks said "done-deal, no contest". There are significant mass-storage advantages to blu-ray. But MOST IMPORTANT I feel is the publics acceptanceof a neat sounding word like Blu-Ray, much better than trying to say HD-DVD.....This simple name of a format thing is much ignored...Try saying SACD to a record store clerk and their eyes glaze over, DVD-Audio was better but still stupid, could have been called cd-plus or something and gone over much better as an audio format, just my 2cents worth, Mike.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6142137.html

It looks as if XBOX is saying if HD fails...they will then have add on B/R players.
Some of the Xbox 360 owners had said that MS was probably hedging there bets and/or not having full faith in HD....looks like they were right.
wow the new formats are failing already and SACD is still releasing new software and players.
Thanks Ears...just as I suspected. The key thing is ability & motivations of the two consortiums. HD-DVD camp is led by Toshiba OK, but the two other important mfrs are NEC and Sanyo. NEC is already hedging its bets and purchased a 45% equity stake in a Sony Blu Ray JV. Sanyo is going through a large restructuring excecise due to a lack of profitability. Also note that its not just about DVDs and home entertainment but high capacity storage in recorders and PCs: HP, Dell and Sony are from the IT side of the equations supporting Blu Ray with many others as well all leaning that way. Microsoft is supporting HD DVD for now but only as an optional add on to X Box 360 and the primary reason for supporting it is to battle PS3: but their key issue is market share of X Box itself and narrowing the gap: besides all lose money on the game machines and make money on the games themselves with the long-term objective making these game machines the center of home entertainment systems and digital home at large: thus the standard of Optical Disk Drives is less of a strategic issue for Microsoft and they will end up supporting both as add ons if needed. But for Blu Ray, Sony has developed it and spend R&D etc: there is much more committment: note also Sony is market leader in the ODD market at large: its not just about DVD players. Finally for Intel, again may not a big issue anyway: X Box, Ps3 and the upcoming Nintendo's Revolution all moved from Intel to IBM architecture anyway.

So expect a war during 2006-7 but ultimately the writing is on the wall.