I'd just like to again thank Warner for prematurely ending the HD-DVD / BR battle and taking competition away from HD formats. Instead of Blu Ray manufacturers being forced to lower hardware prices to match Toshiba's - they're all still $500. And I still haven't seen the famed, phantom "cheap Chinese BR players" in stores anywhere.
First of all, the Format war was not prematruely ended. Anyone with an IQ higher than peanut butter knew that Blu Ray would beat HDDVD - not only as a storage medium, but because SONY was pushing it with every single sale of the PS3 which allowed its market penetration to accelerate as quickly as DVD did when SONY put it in PS2.
If you wanna thank someone for causing Blu Ray to win, thank MICROSOFT for not putting an HDDVD drive in the Xbox360 ELITE/ 360 PREMIUM. That woulda allowed HDDVD to penetrate the market easily. Rather than buying a $600 HDDVD player, people coulda just bought a $400 360 and then walked out BEST BUY with the intention of purchasing HDDVD movies.
The Playstation 3 is the only Blu Ray player I woulda considered buying anyway. Not only is it a player, but its firmware can be (and has been) upgraded to accomodate new Blu Ray standards.
While I don't agree with Steve I think you are a little too hasty to pat yourself on the back about Blu-Ray's "big win". If you recall Warner very nearly dropped Blu-Ray and went HD DVD exclusive. Warner (and probably other studios) had concerns about Blu-Rays manufacturing capacity, failure rate on BD50 media, lack of interactive features, etc.
We were in fact told to expact $299 and under Blu-Ray players from Tier1 manufacturers during the summer of 2008, and currently only a tiny number of players have hit the $299 price point.
Hopefully by Xmas we will see Profile 1.1 BD players for $249-$299 on store shelves, but $249 BD Live players probably won't be available until Xmas of 2009.... and we have to hope that there is still enough interest in BD in the current economy that it doesn't become a niche product like Laser Disc.
SSD improvements are eventually going to make disk mediums obsolete. As SSD's get cheaper, laptops will get smaller with higher capacity HDD's. Eventually, it will become easy to upload entire BD or DVD videos to the HDD (probably a software program will allow lay users to do so). Once that happens, Disks themselves will just be backups of the images. I doubt many people will want to sacrifice battery power and compact form factors for a disk drive.
I don't really see that there will be more than 2 disk formats after Blu Ray. SSD drives eventually will become the universal standard. That is unless holographic storage suddenly makes huge gains.
I agree. It's been a while now and BD players are still not up to HD par years ago. You could buy $150 HD players last year that were awesome. and had more features. This 7.1 /HD audio crap is vertually useless to 99.999% of buyers. I've also use BD live on a couple disc's with the PS3 and it it the worst thing/service I have ever used, ever! It slow, crashes, and even downloads the wrong data. I freaking hate BD. The menu system bites ass and the last ps3 update stopped my remote working. I always use my HD player to upconvert because it does a better job than the PS3 and I will still get a HD movie if I can over a BD. They just look better. Unless you have tried all of these hardware you have no idea what you are talking about. I also watch on a 1080p projector with a 125" screen so my hardware is the latest and greatest. My little TV is a 56" 1080p also. I also think the disc's are still way over priced. They should be the same price as DVD's or they will never take off. I starting to believe it is way more expensive to produce the disc's and the players so by the time they get the cost down the world will have moved on. And for the SSD guy; I have no idea what you are smoking. You need like 16GB for a 1080p movie so at current price you wild have a $30 disc. DL DVD's are made for pennies and HD-DVD were not much more. BD is a whole different production method that apparently does cost way more to produce.
I don't know where the SSD discussion came from as I was refuting your comment about anybody who preferred HD DVD or thought it had a chance was a moron.
As far as solid state and downloads goes.
1. Call me when I can get a 50GB SSD drive for the 20 cents it costs to make a Blu-Ray disc.
2. Downloads are turds. The audio/video quality is crap and you don't even own the freaking movie. What a joke.
Blu-ray probably is the last physical format for AV we are going to see, but if studios and CEs want it to succeed in a sluggish economy they are going to have to get prices down, and fast.
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I'd just like to again thank Warner for prematurely ending the HD-DVD / BR battle and taking competition away from HD formats. Instead of Blu Ray manufacturers being forced to lower hardware prices to match Toshiba's - they're all still $500. And I still haven't seen the famed, phantom "cheap Chinese BR players" in stores anywhere.
Thats such a stupid position to take.
First of all, the Format war was not prematruely ended. Anyone with an IQ higher than peanut butter knew that Blu Ray would beat HDDVD - not only as a storage medium, but because SONY was pushing it with every single sale of the PS3 which allowed its market penetration to accelerate as quickly as DVD did when SONY put it in PS2.
If you wanna thank someone for causing Blu Ray to win, thank MICROSOFT for not putting an HDDVD drive in the Xbox360 ELITE/ 360 PREMIUM. That woulda allowed HDDVD to penetrate the market easily. Rather than buying a $600 HDDVD player, people coulda just bought a $400 360 and then walked out BEST BUY with the intention of purchasing HDDVD movies.
The Playstation 3 is the only Blu Ray player I woulda considered buying anyway. Not only is it a player, but its firmware can be (and has been) upgraded to accomodate new Blu Ray standards.
Flashpoint,
While I don't agree with Steve I think you are a little too hasty to pat yourself on the back about Blu-Ray's "big win". If you recall Warner very nearly dropped Blu-Ray and went HD DVD exclusive. Warner (and probably other studios) had concerns about Blu-Rays manufacturing capacity, failure rate on BD50 media, lack of interactive features, etc.
We were in fact told to expact $299 and under Blu-Ray players from Tier1 manufacturers during the summer of 2008, and currently only a tiny number of players have hit the $299 price point.
Hopefully by Xmas we will see Profile 1.1 BD players for $249-$299 on store shelves, but $249 BD Live players probably won't be available until Xmas of 2009.... and we have to hope that there is still enough interest in BD in the current economy that it doesn't become a niche product like Laser Disc.
Canyon
SSD improvements are eventually going to make disk mediums obsolete. As SSD's get cheaper, laptops will get smaller with higher capacity HDD's. Eventually, it will become easy to upload entire BD or DVD videos to the HDD (probably a software program will allow lay users to do so). Once that happens, Disks themselves will just be backups of the images. I doubt many people will want to sacrifice battery power and compact form factors for a disk drive.
I don't really see that there will be more than 2 disk formats after Blu Ray. SSD drives eventually will become the universal standard. That is unless holographic storage suddenly makes huge gains.
I agree. It's been a while now and BD players are still not up to HD par years ago. You could buy $150 HD players last year that were awesome. and had more features. This 7.1 /HD audio crap is vertually useless to 99.999% of buyers. I've also use BD live on a couple disc's with the PS3 and it it the worst thing/service I have ever used, ever! It slow, crashes, and even downloads the wrong data. I freaking hate BD.
The menu system bites ass and the last ps3 update stopped my remote working.
I always use my HD player to upconvert because it does a better job than the PS3 and I will still get a HD movie if I can over a BD. They just look better. Unless you have tried all of these hardware you have no idea what you are talking about. I also watch on a 1080p projector with a 125" screen so my hardware is the latest and greatest. My little TV is a 56" 1080p also.
I also think the disc's are still way over priced. They should be the same price as DVD's or they will never take off. I starting to believe it is way more expensive to produce the disc's and the players so by the time they get the cost down the world will have moved on.
And for the SSD guy; I have no idea what you are smoking. You need like 16GB for a 1080p movie so at current price you wild have a $30 disc. DL DVD's are made for pennies and HD-DVD were not much more. BD is a whole different production method that apparently does cost way more to produce.
Flash,
I don't know where the SSD discussion came from as I was refuting your comment about anybody who preferred HD DVD or thought it had a chance was a moron.
As far as solid state and downloads goes.
1. Call me when I can get a 50GB SSD drive for the 20 cents it costs to make a Blu-Ray disc.
2. Downloads are turds. The audio/video quality is crap and you don't even own the freaking movie. What a joke.
Blu-ray probably is the last physical format for AV we are going to see, but if studios and CEs want it to succeed in a sluggish economy they are going to have to get prices down, and fast.