Lack of competition sends Blu-ray player prices upward

Late last month, we actually posed the question of buying a Blu-ray player now (being that the format war is over and all), or waiting things out until prices sink and Profile 2.0 players flood the market. Aside from the PlayStation 3 -- which is actually priced fairly reasonably if you were in the hunt for a new console anyway -- it seems as though HD DVD's exit has actually caused Blu-ray player prices to creep back upwards. Granted, this is about as far from surprising as it gets -- after all, it's nothing short of supply and demand working its magic. Still, it wasn't too long ago that we saw Toshiba actively putting pressure on the Blu camp to reduce prices in order to stay competitive, and now that said pressure has vanished, stickers on the whole have headed north. Ah well, it's not like the consumer didn't ask for this, um, right?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 15th 2008 4:23PM]

Prices will come down. Maybe it doesn't look that way now because of lack of competition. Think about it for a second, BD manufacturers have a new market and they want to see how much the consumer is willing to pay. To them the technology is too good to price themselves out of the market so for the next little while they are just going to play around with the market to see what they can get away with.

Don't hold your breath about China not having licensing rights for BD either it's only a matter of time before pirated versions come onto their market. Lets not forget that China is emerging as a huge market so it will either be pirated BD or Sony will sell them a license to produce BD products

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 16th 2008 10:56PM]

Haha! This is too funny! This is a good thing. People want high prices. That is why Blu-Ray won! Everyone should be happy Blu-Ray won the format war, and prices will always be artificially high, as per Sony norm. Death to cheap DVD and HD DVD!!!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 17th 2008 6:53AM]

Quick jump on amazon shows that this week, all of them dropped in price across the board, with one of them hitting an all time low. Guess there are weekly fluctuations up and down on price. Odd.