I realize that manufacturers, retail outlets, and studios want to preserve margins as long as they can and they've made an effort to present Blu-ray as a premium format that deserves to be marked up. (It's also worth noting that you don't get the free shipping on Amazon on anything less than $25, which makes you understand the price has been set where it is for a reason). The fact is the majority of blue-chip Blu-ray titles cost around $25, with some, like Iron Man, coming in at $20. Granted, the Blu-ray version comes with three discs (there's a two-disc version for 50 cents less, but why bother?) and the DVD is only a single disc. For example, if you take a look at Wall-E, which currently sits atop Amazon's Blu-ray bestseller list, it costs $24.95 versus $14.99 for the DVD. That said, the bigger problem is prices for Blu-ray movies compared to DVDs. We can debate exactly when it will happen (feel free to comment), but in the near future the initiation fee for entering Club Blu-ray will be relatively negligible-or at least not a serious stumbling block. Profile 1.1 players aren't BD-Live enabled, which means you won't be able to access certain interactive features- for better or worse.īD-Live issues aside, I'm betting we'll see $99 for a Blu-ray player inside of four months, if not sooner, the way the economy is going. As we found out with HD-DVD players, $99 really is a magic price point, though it is worth pointing out that these budget Blu-ray players are only profile 1.1, while the $99 HD DVD players were fully up to spec and allowed for firmware upgrades via Ethernet (the cheap Blu-ray players can't be updated and sometimes simply can't play certain movies). While $150 isn't bad, I think we're going to see $99 fairly soon, with a couple of stops at $129.99. The Wall-E Blu-ray costs $10 more than the DVD: Is that too big a premium in a tight economy? That's on top of both the Samsung BD-P1500 and the Sony BDP-S300 slipping in and out of sub-$200 territory at Amazon and other outlets. The other day had the Memorex MVBD2510 player at $139.99 for a one-day sale and now is selling it for $146.99 (shipping included) and Buy.com has it at $149.99. We've been keeping an eye on prices for Blu-ray players and it appears that a handful of budget-brand models are starting to crack the $150 barrier.
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