The Future Of Blu-ray
Dear Gary:
I liked your article on the future of Blu-ray™. As a consumer who you might say is financially challenged (i. e. living on a very tight budget), I have to say that I agree with you that the prices of Blu-ray Disc® players are just going to have to go down in price before the masses of consumers, including people like me, adopt Blu-ray instead of DVD. With the prices of oil products and food going up, consumers are going to have less to spend on luxuries like electronics, as time goes by. It is too bad the electronics companies are not smart enough to have sales on Blu-ray Disc players while Americans are getting their tax rebate cheques, which their government is encouraging them to spend rather than to save or pay down their credit card debt. If Sony and the other companies were smart, they would immediately reduce the price of the 40 GB PlayStation®3 by $100 or even $150 to the $250 to $300 range, to get Blu-ray Disc players in the hands of consumers while they have these tax rebate checks—that would help to promote the adoption of Blu-ray over DVD. As it is, it’s starting to look as if it will be sometime in 2009 before prices will come down to that range.
I am waiting for the Profile 2.0 Blu-ray Disc players to come out in the Fall before investing in one. But, with most still being around $500, it is still too much for me and for most consumers. We are just not going to pay that much for even a high-definition disc player like Blu-ray. Unless the price of those new Profile 2.0 Blu-ray Disc players that are coming out in the Fall before the end of this year, go below $400, I will have to opt for the PlayStation 3 if I want to get a Blu-ray player this year. After all, that is what won the high-definition DVD format war for Sony, the Playstation 3. I am making it my goal to get a Blu-ray Disc player either in the Fall or for Christmas.
Toshiba is wise to concentrate on manufacturing the best upconverting standard DVD players it can. The Toshiba HD A3 HD DVD player that I have up converts standard DVDs so well that HD DVD's picture quality is not that much better than standard DVD or standard DVDs are so good that they seem almost if they are true high-definition. Ironically, of all the HD DVDs that I have purchased or rented from Blockbuster® (they are no longer renting HD DVDs), it is the Smallville Season 5 and Season 6 HD DVD sets that look the best of any of the HD DVDs that I have. Most other HD DVDs do not look that much better than HD television programs, but the Smallville HD DVDs are noticeably better picture quality than the high-definition telecasts of the episodes on TV.
Tyler Barnes
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