The corporate decisions at Samsung are hard to understand and interpret. For one thing they rushed the BDP-1000 to market and this BLU-RAY player received so many bad reviews until Samsung fixed most the picture quality issues with a firmware update. Why did Samsung rush a player to market that was not ready? In some companies people would get fired for releasing firmware that received so many bad reviews. At least with a firmware update this was corrected several months later. It just was a shame that for around 6 months all the magazines had nothing but the Samsung to review.
The other thing I do not understand is why Samsung would announce a combo player that is going to sale for under $1000 in the fall when they just a few weeks ago released the BDP-1200 for $799. Many people that wanted to purchase the BDP-1200 for $799 might now wait for the BD-UP5000 that might sale for only $999. If one is going to spend $799 on a player then one might as will spend another $200 so that they can play Universal Studio HD-DVD discs.
Samsung is really planning on coming out with this combo player. They even have a model number for it now. Samsung should have waited until summer to announce this new player. It’s kind of like they wanted to kill the sales of the BDP-1200 that just came out.
I would be very surprised if Samsung was to make a HD-DVD player only. There is no market for such a product. As long as Universal Studios stays HD-DVD exclusive there is a market for combo players.
Maybe one day Mircosoft or Toshiba will make a business deal with Samsung and HD-DVD players will come on the market. Toshiba has only sold 100,000 HD-DVD players which is a joke.
|