Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players

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?"

Motivation

[Wolvie MkM]

Get out the tinfoil hats but I wonder if the HD-DVD group "persuaded" K-Mart with a wack of cash to dump BR ala Paramount?

$98 hd-dvd

[notext]

Rumor has it walmart will have the toshiba A2 hd-dvd for $98 on black friday

http://www.cnbc.com/id/21581845 [cnbc.com]

Re:I was expecting sony to really drop the price o

[Chandon Seldon]

You realize that it's been years now, right? And that there hasn't been a winner yet. A PS3 is like $400. A HDDVD player is like $200. If you buy either and the associated media format fades into obscurity it's not that big a deal - especially compared to the nice HDTV you'd have to get to make it matter at all.

Kmart vs Wal-Mart

[Techogeek]

Kmart to drop Blue Ray sales and Wal-Mart to sell a sub-$100 HD DVD player. http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34650/97/ [tgdaily.com] See the pattern here? Both Kmart and Walmart are among the top leading names in budget department stores.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:No.

[moosesocks]

It'll be a slower adoption than we saw with DVDs, but considering that we're approaching the point where a HD-DVD player isn't considerably more than the cost of a decent regulat DVD player, I have a feeling that consumers looking to buy a new DVD player will be willing to jump for the extra $50 to get a HD-DVD unit.

Rumor is that we'll be seeing players costing between $100 and $150 in the next month, which is almost low enough to be in the 'Impulse Buy' range. Because HD-DVD players are of course backward compatible, and typically offer some sort of upscaling, they'll sell enough of these things to consumers who aren't even particularly interested in buying HD-DVD discs so that there's not nearly as much of a chicken/egg situation between players and discs. For now, there's enough content to get by and make it worthwhile.

So, no. We won't see a massive rush to upgrade to HD-DVD. However, players should begin to slowly seep into the marketplace, and after a few years, it'll be 'mainstream'. HD-capable TVs are also becoming increasingly common these days, and I'd bet that consumers shelling out money for a new TV will also spring for a HD-DVD player, considering the low price.

Unless sony drops the price of their Blu-Ray equipment, Blu-Ray is dead in the water. Have they already forgotten BetaMax?

Observations in Singapore

[rubenerd]

I think this development is very telling, but its just a symptom not just of BluRay's failure, but the whole market for higher definition optical media.

I'm an Aussie but I've lived nearly my whole life in Singapore where electronic gadgets are not just a nice thing to have, they're almost status symbols, like most parts of affluent Asia I assume. When DVDs came along everyone was scrambling to get the latest devices, televisions and movie releases on the new format, but here we are in 2007 and only a handful of retailers here even know what BluRay and HDDVD players are, let alone sell them. In SINGAGPORE, one of the high tech capitals of the world. It's mind boggling.

So this Kmart in the United States story doesn't really surprise me. What I'm interested to know though is the overall market for high definition optical media not just "us" versus "them" Betamax style. Do many of you in the States own such players? Do you have many movies? Have you really paid much attention to it? Is it as bleak in your part of the world as it is in ours?

I think price is just one of many factors relating to slow adoption, and it's not the primary one.

Is something better coming along?

[Animats]

Blu-Ray and HD don't have enough capacity to store really good HDTV without overcompression. Everything still blurs during motion and pans. Then, when motion stops, enough data comes in for the decompressor to catch up. Yuck. That's why the demo content in the stores is either near-static scenes without camera pans, or something with so much action that you can't see the artifacts. Long, slow pans still suck. They suck for 24FPS film, too, but we have the technology to do better now.

Right now, the displays are better than the storage medium. You can buy 1080p flat screens without any problem. Some of them can even do 60FPS. We need 4x to 8x as much data on the storage medium to feed those big, fast screens properly.

This will probably happen after the NFL figures out some way to transmit football at 60FPS.

Fanbois proven wrong yet again

[xigxag]

Fanboys have been lamenting this "stupid" "pointless" format war from the beginning but this just proves it has been wonderful from the consumer point of view. Had there been only one format, chances are we'd still have to pay $400-$500 minimum for players. Thank you, competition.

Re:No.

[Lehk228]

more than half of PS3 owners don't even know they can watch High Def movies on it

I prefer HD-DVD anyway

[Discgolferusa]

As someone who owns a player for both formats I would have to say that I prefer HD-DVD. So far, it appears to be the more innovative of the two technologies when it comes down to actual delivered content (non-interrupting main menus, bookmarking, video timelines). Every Blu-Ray disc I've watched so far (which granted, haven't been that many) appear to offer no more benefit than a standard DVD does when it comes to innovative content.

Sure, I know that Blu-Ray can physically hold more data, but most people in the general public aren't going to care about that. I think Sony could have done so much more with the standard, but have honestly fallen short of my expectations. I would have hoped that both "next-gen" formats would have delivered that "wow this is cool" feeling. HD-DVD does it somewhat, but Blu-Ray seems to think that HD content is enough.

What do other dual format owners think? Is there some cool Blu-Ray specific feature that I've not seen yet?

Something you need to know about this posting

[Lord Byron II]

I've been a part of this community for quite some time and I often contribute stories. Only rarely do they ever get accepted. I've noticed that the stories that make it to the front page tend to have two qualities - they are sensationalist and they ask rhetorical questions. I decided to try and see if adding those qualities to my submissions would work. Hence, I added the "they'll keep selling PS3s for now" bit for the melodrama and then I added the required rhetorical question. Sure enough, it got accepted.