Blu-ray Players for $200 ‘Widely Expected’ by the Holiday Season

An increase in the number of chip building for Blu-ray seems destined to speed up chip commoditization and price declines, and consumers will be the winners. Ken Lowe, vice president of strategic marketing at Sigma Designs, said it’s widely expected that new Blu-ray players from China and Taiwan will be in stores at prices near $200 in time for Christmas.

http://formatwarcentral.com/index.php/2008/02/27/blu-ray-players-for-200-widely-expected-by-the-holiday-season/

I just hope they have at least profile 2.0, Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD, etc at that price. There's no reason to expect otherwise.

falcon to call your hope futile is more than stating the obvious. This sounds more in line with a new profile coming out and a lowering of the "inferior" profiles to 200.
Which, by all means sounds bad for the market as a whole, imo. A lot of companies eat a lot of cost to produce BR players. I don't think Sony is really able to undercut them like the way it sounds.

[Post edited by theprof00 on Feb 28, 2008]

Not widely expected by anyone in THIS reality. Maybe you'll get some nice Profile 1.0 players for $200. But why would you expect anything more than that?

STILL EXPENSIVE.

For 200 bucks, some (not all...the price is STILL too high) Joe6Packs will buy a less then 2.0 player and not even know the difference. The real question is, what will full featured players cost this Christmas? (Like the Oppo perhaps). There should be some new products coming out by the end of the summer, then the picture will become a little clearer.

Xplay, $200 is NOT expensive for a hidef player. As long as it works as advertised that's a great price IMO.

This is the BEST Blu Ray news I have heard since I got into this format war. I will be in the market for one if it is 2.0 and 200.00.

Quote:
Not widely expected by anyone in THIS reality. Maybe you'll get some nice Profile 1.0 players for $200. But why would you expect anything more than that?

BINGOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Lets make a bet guys, that maybe if there are players that cheap, it'll be the 1.0 and the others would be at the very least 350

You're probably right Kuco but you shouldn't have to pay $350 for a fully functional bluray player. Is the hardware REALLY that expensive to make? Especially with all this talk about the prices of the blue diodes dropping and chips going down in prices etc.

Maybe for boxing day they will be reasonable.

[Post edited by Falcon01 on Feb 28, 2008]

Quote:
Lets make a bet guys, that maybe if there are players that cheap, it'll be the 1.0

All new Blu-ray models introduced since October of last year must be at least profile 1.1.

Customers are getting soaked... To bad profile 2.0 didn't look like this...

Quote:
All new Blu-ray models introduced since October of last year must be at least profile 1.1.

Gotta get rid of that old stock first though! Reatilers don't like stuff just sitting in the warehouses taking up space.

So you might have the barely functional 1.0 players sitting on the shelf for a paltry $200 come November. But the 1.1 and 2.0/BD Live players will likely be sitting pretty at $400+

[Post edited by spoonard on Feb 29, 2008]

FYI, if you haven't notices, it says 'widely expected'...which only means we get our high hopes of a cheap player, and nothing happens...

random reaggie...

but i do like that blu profile model.

does she upconvert?

Quote:
You're probably right Kuco but you shouldn't have to pay $350 for a fully functional bluray player. Is the hardware REALLY that expensive to make?

This was part of the problem which Toshiba created. Yes, they have to be that expensive, as would have been Toshiba's players had Toshiba not chosen to subsidize them. Unfortunately, to buy market share, they dropped their prices to a point where only subsidized players could compete with them. Since no other hardware manufacturer would subsidize players, Toshiba was left as the only player.

I am fairly confident that one important reason Toshiba has chosen not to enter the Blu-ray market is that their natural customer base (previous HD DVD customers) will not purchase players at unsubsidized prices and would likely be angry were Toshiba not to launch with a dual format player that would be even more expensive (certainly at least $200 more than a standalone Blu-ray player).

/carmi

Quote:
All new Blu-ray models introduced since October of last year must be at least profile 1.1.

Why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good rant?

/carmi

Quote:
Quote:
All new Blu-ray models introduced since October of last year must be at least profile 1.1.


Why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good rant?

/carmi

Here's a fact...the Samsung UP-5000 HD DVD/Blu combo deck is NOT profile 1.1 and it was released in December. Supposedly the unit will be upgraded to 1.1 via a firmware update, just like almost every other missing feature on the unit.

[Post edited by Bosshog7 on Mar 3, 2008]

Until prices come down its hard to buy Disney movies on Blu ray because
my kids have SD dvd in their room and while I would love to buy them a cheap 1.0 Blue player
I am not going to pay more then 200 bucks for something a two and a four year old will likely end up destroying.

So for now I will buy all but the Pixar movies on SD.
And I know I am not the only parent in this boat.

Blu needs to be more realistic about prices or risk forever becoming just a nitch market as it is now,

[Post edited by xavier311 on Mar 3, 2008]