"Its interesting to note that neither Target or Costco now have an hd dvd player for sale online but both have BD players." You might want to double check availablity at Costco on-line. |
Untill the general public cares about either of these formats the arguements are mute, as of now it doesnt look like people really care about taking on another format. Now if there are cheap players and movie clubs gave away a player with a purchase contract...say 10 in 3 years or whatever then maybe something would fly. |
Newbie 13, a few days after Target announced that the Sony s-300 Blu-ray player was the only stand alone that would be sold in their store this Holiday season, and for a week straight neither had them available online. Maybe they were waiting on the new model players. Rysa, so there is still nothing official, just more of the same rumour started on AVS being re-hashed by the A/P this time. Blu-ray players from Funai and Gowell are officially coming though. I see you telling members that the PS3 is not being bought as a BD player but how do you explain that hd dvd was ahead in sales in Europe until this spring when after 1 week of PS3 sales, Blu-ray software was responsible for 87% of all HD software sales? Also, how do you explain that ever since the PS3 was readily availble on U.S. store shelves in January, that Blu-ray has out sold hd dvd at least 2-1 and up to 3-1 every single week in the nielson ratings? Even when there were new hd dvd releases and no new Blu-ray releases, it remained 2-1 that week. Anyone interested in finding fact from fiction can look at the Nielsen ratings for this entire year and keep looking because those numbers are going to be getting worse by the week for hd dvd, all the way through the Holidays. |
The Associated Press confirmed the Chinese HD-DVD player release at 199.99 for this fall; that's where all of the codec info came from as well. Without an ethernet connection currrent Blu Ray players are going to be obsolete. The Toshiba players allow for online updating of software ( which is very cool) as well as use for online interactive features in the future. The HD-DVD players of course upscale standard DVDs wonderfully as well. The memory requirements and processing power needed to make Blu Rays less efficient software writing means either a very expensive player or some lessor performance characteristics as far as speed of loading as well as interactive features. I don't disagree that the "format war" won't go on for awhile for sure; and I don't know if either format will truely win as well. I would stay away from Blu Ray players for now though- they will improve in a way that will make current ones obsolete very quickly. As has already happened. |
Oh yea- alomost forgot, the writer of the Associated Press Article is Gary Gentile and it came out August 10th 2007. He writes out of Los Angeles but I saw the article on a Nashville News Affiliate website. The article is not totally focused on China by any means; but it does clearly state that HD-DVD players made in China are expected to be released for 199.99 in December. |
