Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players 392
Lord Byron II writes "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores, primarily because of the high cost of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD (now under $200). They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being. Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"
No clear winner, yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
The PS3 isn't a Blu-Ray player??? (Score:4, Insightful)
1.) The PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, arguably the best, that's what I bought mine for.
2.) "Time Being" meaning to imply Kmart may drop the PS3 also? And not sell all 3 of the current generation game players? Not likely.
HD-DVD could win, but in general people are not buying quality 1080P HDTVs at Kmart, they are buying cut rate 720P stuff that doesn't look that much better with HD-DVD than upscaled DVD.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't good for Blu-Ray, but it isn't the sky falling either.
Re:No clear winner, yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
The pirate community has made a decision: h.264 files on DVD+Rs.
So if that's your criteria, you just need to get a DVD player that can playback 1080p h.264.
Video On Demand Makes BluRay/HD-DVD Irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure some people will buy / use such players, but most people are skipping right to utilizing video-on-demand instead
Ron
Re:Motivation (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry to be that harsh, but it is the reality that the people shopping at Kmart are shopping there to get the product that is cheap and meets their function, which means HD-DVD for them, because it is cheap and meets their function, overall specs be damned. Sony et. al. blu-ray camp needs to step up their manufacturing to bring down their costs. They also need to start getting some real marketing and PR done and soon. This holiday season may decide the format war. The PS3 helps, but they need to get some games out for that. I myself have only bought 2, and one of them I don't even play because I forgot how much I HATE FPS's on consoles (give me my mouse...).
Player sales don't even matter (Score:3, Insightful)
The best week HD-DVD ever had was the recent Transformers release. In that week, Blu-Ray movies still managed to outsell HD-DVD! So what happens now that Spider Man 3 and other large hits are coming out Blu-Ray only?
Re:No clear winner, yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and before DVD-Rs came out, it was Divx DVD-rips on CD-Rs. That only tells you what writable format is popular now, not what will be popular next.
HD-DVD Wins... (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't know anything about one format or the other, or even care, but they know HD is good and DVD sounds familiar and easy to use. HD-DVD was a great move because it leveraged the gajillions of dollars that have already been pumped into marketing "HD" and "DVD", and the familiarity that goes with both.
Re:Video On Demand Makes BluRay/HD-DVD Irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
The per-user cost of the routers, servers, and set-top boxes has got to be well over twice as much as a blu-ray or HD-DVD player is now. I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not there yet and I don't see cable companies as smart enough to figure it out.
Re:No clear winner, yet. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:5, Insightful)
Not for the immediate futher, but don't rule them out yet... Sony has lost this kind of match before, back in the Beta vs VHS battle. Seems they forgot the lesson learned then.
It means the lower cost and wider availability of a player, either player, will determine the outcome. Sony charged high prices and licenced their Betamax technology in the 70's, thus we had VHS as the eventual winner. Not learning from their prior mistake? No deja fubar?*
*fubar spelt that way for you anal types.
Re:$98 hd-dvd sooner (Score:3, Insightful)
http://holiday.ri-walmart.com/?section=secret [ri-walmart.com]
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a directly comparable situation. Blu-Ray isn't going to die because it lives in every PS3 that is sold. Even if all the other studios switch (and it will take a lot for Disney to lose face and switch) Sony will continue to offer Blu-Ray content for the forseeable future. Not to mention, Blu-Ray burners store more and are likely to be predominant in the storage arena unless the HD-DVD people start making cheap burners too. So on second thought, maybe it is comparable in the sense that it actually took Betamax a long time to die, twenty-seven years according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. In that length of time, chances are neither HD-DVD nor BluRay will resemble what we see today, if they exist at all.
Fact is, Sony had a chance to end this war before it started by compromising a bit and agreeing to use HDi/iHD instead of BD-J. Its hatred for all things Microsoft caused it to make a monumental blunder. And in snubbing Redmond, it couldn't even come off as a champion of the people because of the extreme "Sony Style" DRM built into Blu-Ray.
Re:But it's not just the player... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a funny thing. When you become a landlord, you notice that people you think would be desperate enough not to want to pay $60/month for cable ALMOST ALWAYS DO--and they almost always prefer to neglect everything else but the cable TV bill. Back when I owned real estate, I used to cut my poorer tenants slack. I'd pay the water bill so they wouldn't let my lawn die. I pitched in on the electricity and gas because I couldn't see them living in the dark, shivering to death.
When I found out that oh, 80% percent (my experience) of the people in this situation in life would rather have deluxe fucking digital cable TV than running water, or heat... I lost all sympathy. I mean, this was at a time where I just got basic cable six months before, because it was like $3 more after I got the internet package from Comcast. I will not ever pay that much for freaking TV. So, anyway, I kicked their asses out and eventually sold my rentals. They now live in cold, dark closets of apartments and I'm much happier.
Lesson is, if people slowed down on the Cable, starbucks, restaurants and other money pits in their lives, a vast majority of them could afford nice things. Maybe it's not some strange coincidence that lots of people who aren't good with money end up the low person on the totem pole?
PS3 is the only Blu-ray player that matters ATM (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that mean it's going to win? No. But it certainly doesn't sound like it's losing.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Video downloads on the 'net are typically offered at VGA resolution, if not less, and are almost always compressed to hell.
iTunes does it. Netflix does it, and as far as I know, so does Amazon.
If you want a comparison of just how much bigger a 1080p image is than a typical VGA download, look here [wikipedia.org]. Oh, and the smallest box in that image is more than twice the size of a YouTube video.
An HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc holds something like 20-40GiB of high-res video. 99% of broadband connections today cannot stream that much that quickly, and even a download would take prohibitively long, and be incredibly cumbersome to store due to the huge size of the files. I'd daresay that the internet backbone couldn't handle those sort of loads even if HD streaming became commonplace and there was broadband connectivity to support it.
Streaming's cool, but removable storage is going to have the edge in the video market for the foreseeable future if it's HD we're talking about.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
2. With everyone saying, "Oh man, a sub-100$ HD-DVD player, that's going to win the format war for sure!!" I think there is one thing that people are forgetting- HIGH-DEF is not yet for the masses. Less than half the people in the country have HDTV. That will change after Christmas, but it hasn't yet. It is a premium item. The people who do buy HDDVD/BLURAY are people who can afford the premium (typically). This HDDVD player is the "Coby"/knock-off brand of HDDVD player (Yes, I know Toshiba is not a knock-off brand..). This is a 1080i player, not 1080p. Many people can't tell the difference, but people who can afford HD typically care. Nobody spends 1000's of dollars on a system to add a 100$ player. Until HDTV's are cheaper and get near the 500-700 range for a 42" or above instead of around 1000-1400, then HD player prices will matter. This one player, (which is only going on sale for a few days, this is NOT a permanent price fix) is not going to win the format war. It will convince some people to get one and a few movies (despite that the 5 movies that come with it really suck donkey balls.) This will help the HDDVD camp for bragging rights for a few weeks, and their sales MIGHT top Bluray for a while, but this player will not "win" the format-war.
Re:But it's not just the player... (Score:2, Insightful)
People can ruin their lives because of their vice, be it nicotine or TV.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:5, Insightful)
As for data storage? Well I'd love to get with that, but again, there's no way I'm getting a writer until two things happen
1: Someone wins this spat.
2: Whoever wins decides they've tapped out the 'adopt early and pay big coin' brigade, and prices for writers drop to something reasonable.
Re:Is something better coming along? (Score:1, Insightful)
4k camera shooting at up to 60fps
or 2k at 100fps if you prefer
Re:Irrelevant (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that HD-DVD may have its way to the mass market, because its names says dvd and these will be soon really cheap, as cheap as DVD players. I mean, if you were the average Joe and have to choose between a regular DVD player and a HD-DVD player in the same cheap price range, which one would you buy? HD-DVD is not about fast adoption, it's more about progressive integration.
Re:No clear winner, yet. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
Sumbitter bias (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't yet decided which format I'm going to choose for my upcoming home theater purchase, but reading reviews it is certainly evident that writers insert their own bias when reporting on the format war. This submitter is no exception.
For example the submitter writes: "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores ... They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being". The last sentence implies that they may at any time stop selling the PS3 as well. The original article however states "Of course, Kmart will continue to sell the Playstation 3, which includes a Blu-ray player", with the 'of course' implying that it's obvious that dropping the PS3 would not even be a consideration. The difference in perspective is obvious.
Now lets say the the submitter was an actual journalist in a mainstream publication. You could then easily imagine other people picking up on that inference and stating 'K-Mart drops Blu-Ray - considers dropping PS3 as well" or something along those lines.
For all submitters, if you are going to post something, keep your own agenda out of it.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
(Especially when DVDs I had already bought started coming out in "super criterion extended bonus editions" 4-5 years later)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
"Many people can't tell the difference, but people who can afford HD typically care"
but in fact it's already contrafactual on its face. Perhaps 1% of ppl in the market for these devices can tell the difference and care. The other 99% will buy what the salesperson at the big box store tells them is the best.
Which means that more will buy the more expensive 1080p stuff, but not for the reason GP states.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it isn't. You must not have seen the terms 1080p30 and 1080p60 before. 1080p30 is "standard".
From here [wikipedia.org]:
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
Blah blah blah, who gives a shit?
How's the picture look to Joe Sixpack? Nice and clear with warm colors? That wins over the techno-babble jabber malarkey.
Re:No clear winner, yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get HD with 1.4MB floppy disks too...
Lossy codecs will allow you to compress ANY resolution down to ANY size. It's all a matter of degree. The fact is, the more bits you have available, the more detail you can preserve. High-def disk formats offer MUCH more storage, and so can store a MUCH higher quality picture.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's to you, Mr. Early Adopter. (Real Men of Genius)
You take the early systems with their bugs, incompatibilities, and problems and live with them and deal with them just so you can 'have it' before anyone else. (Yeah, I got it and you don't!)
All the while, petting your ego and inflating your self esteme so you can feel better about yourself and elevating yourself above the unwashed masses. (This new device makes me a better person!)
After all, you know that directing someone's attention to your new shiny gadget is easy, and it distracts them from finding out about your secret about your junk size. (Awwww... don't look there!)
So, here's to you... Mr. Early Adopter. (Real Men of Geniusssssss)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:1, Insightful)
The other poster was referring to 1080i60 (interlaced content @ 60fps). Content in this format is identical to 1080p30 or 1080p24, depending on the master material.
Personally I'm not a fan of interlaced content either, but there are some applications where it's useful.
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: No Blue Light special on Blue Ray (Score:3, Insightful)
I was under the impression that CRTs required 50/60 (PAL/NTSC) non-interlaced frames per second to avoid unpleasant levels of flickering, but that there was only enough bandwidth for 25/30- which looked bad- so they sent fifty (or sixty) half-frames instead.
Parent is completely wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong again for the same reasons I stated above. Interlaced formats send twice as many half-frames as the same material would have sent full-frames. Again, the grandparent was correct, the same data gets sent, just formatted differently. Actually, there is an exception, which is the 50p and 60p frame rates because there is no equivalent 100i or 120i rates in interlaced; however, I don't think anyone is broadcasting or releasing any material in this format, most likely because there are very few cameras that can capture in this format and it would just kill bandwidth and storage anyway.
I'm not familiar with the exact details of the circuitry that does this, but I'm pretty sure it's nowhere as destructive as you make it out to be, if it's destructive at all. Basically, I believe TVs treat each individual line as a discrete piece of information, so what order you send them in should make no difference.