first hd-dvdplayer at amazon for 499$

[mmmhome]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...onics&v=glance

[hmurchison]

Game over folks.

You know what happens to expensive formats. This battle is over if the PS3 doesn't ship in quantity and on time. Ouch.

[Alex Pallas]

Originally Posted by hmurchison

Game over folks.

You know what happens to expensive formats. This battle is over if the PS3 doesn't ship in quantity and on time. Ouch.

what exactly does that thing play?...as far as i know HD discs aren't even in production

[hmurchison]

Paramount is announcing movies for HD DVD and I think one other studio.

The shocker though is the huge price discrepancy between the platforms. Methinks the BDA was a wee bit confident.

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by mmmhome

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...onics&v=glance

The web page gives no indication (as far as I could find) of when this thing might ship. It could be in two or three weeks, or it could be four or more months away.

Originally Posted by hmurchison

The shocker though is the huge price discrepancy between the platforms. Methinks the BDA was a wee bit confident.

What price discrepancy? I have not seen any prices quoted for BDA players -- just rumors based upon rumors. If this item actually ships before any BDA players are ready I doubt the BDA players will be much more expensive -- if only to keep them in line with this box.

[Gorkab]

This one is really big, sounds like a LaserDisc player !!! Anyone's got the dimensions of this monster ?

PS : 6 POUNDS !!!!

[hmurchison]

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060104/20060104005022.html?.v=1

Pioneer Blu Ray for the home $1800

Match Point

so far just about all major retailers are pre-ordering the Toshiba units

Amazon
Best Buy
Crutchfield

Blu Ray just got owned today folks. All I've gotten back today is weak rebuttals. We all know consumer will gravitate to the cheaper format regardless of studio support.

The best the Playstation can hope to do is match the $499 price. And the Chinese haven't started making players yet.

I expect that by Xmas 2006 HD DVD will be $399 by Xmas 2007 HD DVD will be $199.

Game over!

[zombieflanders]

I love how this doofus is all "Blu-Ray is PWN3D!!!1!eleventyone!!" on the first day of CES, when only a small fraction of companies have announced players and prices, uses the ultra-expensive Pioneer Elite as a baseline, and totally ignores content as being relevant (rumor is Universal will finally go Blu-Ray as well, giving them 100% studio coverage).

Yes, so far there have been one $800 and two $500 HD DVD players announced, while Blu-Ray has one at $1000 and one at $1800. Of course, that $1800 Pioneer Elite is also networked (with MCE!) and the only one to do 1080p, and that Samsung is independently developed. Meanwhile, four studios announce 40+ Blu-Ray titles to HD DVD's 11, the lead time gives other companies a chance to lower prices, and the PS3 (a sure-fire top seller) is still coming down the pike.

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by hmurchison

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060104/20060104005022.html?.v=1

Pioneer Blu Ray for the home $1800

Match Point

so far just about all major retailers are pre-ordering the Toshiba units

Amazon
Best Buy
Crutchfield

Blu Ray just got owned today folks. All I've gotten back today is weak rebuttals. We all know consumer will gravitate to the cheaper format regardless of studio support.

The best the Playstation can hope to do is match the $499 price. And the Chinese haven't started making players yet.

I expect that by Xmas 2006 HD DVD will be $399 by Xmas 2007 HD DVD will be $199.

Game over!

IF the Toshiba box ships in the not too distant future and no BDA member ships a player near $500 before June then you may be right.

Clearly Toshiba (assuming this player ships relatively soon) is treating this player as a loss leader, much like Microsoft and Sony lose money on every game machine they ship for the first year or so. It just remains to be seen if the BDA members will be willing to stoop to the same tactics. If they don't the average consumer may not care and buy tons of HD-DVD players instead. This may in turn force studios and OEM to support HD-DVD when they had not originally planned to.

However, studio and OEM support is a huge factor. Even if Sony had sold Beta machines for half the cost of JVC and other's VHS machines once the studios (and Blockbuster, etc.) were clearly behind VHS then Beta's days as a consumer format were numbered. It's simple: I can buy a player for X dollars and have Y disks to play on it -- or -- I can buy a player for 3 times X dollars and have 50 times Y disks to play on it. Many consumers, but not all, consumers will go for the more costly player with the greater diversity.

An analogy might be made to Windows versus Linux. One can go to HP or Dell and pay a reasonable price for a PC with Windows and buy MS Office for an inflated price and buy Adobe Photoshop for big $$ -- or -- they can go to the local shop and have them put together a Linux machine with open (free) software on it. As has been conclusively shown 90% of people will go with the more expensive solution because it supports what they want (tons of games, office productivity software, specialty software, etc.).

Another analogy can be made with regard to Apple's Macs versus Wintel machines. Since the early 90s there has been much, much more software available for Wintel machines than Macs. When the PowerPC G3 came out it was much, much faster than the Intel or AMD chips of that time. To use your terminology, the PowerPC G3 "owned" the Pentium and other x86 chips. However, virtually no one was buying Macs. Why? Because for every word processor on the Mac there were 10 for the Windows PCs; for every game on the Mac there were 100 for the Windows PCs. This is true even today. It can be conclusively shown that the top end Dell machines and the top end Apple machines are similarly priced. However, with Windows having the support of 10 times more software the choice for most people is simple: buy Dell and not Apple.

Content matters.

[hmurchison]

Funny how I'm the Doofus yet you cannot dispute that

1. $499 buys you a HD DVD player but doesn't get you close to Blu Ray

Yet I'm supposed to base things off of "rumor" and some mythical players coming that you haven't a clue about.

Well let's see

Pioneer computer drive $995 (Recorder)
Pioneer Player - $1800
Samsung Player- $1000

Now I might not be a genius but that's a whole heck of a lot more than $499 and the Playstation pricing isn't even ready to be announced.

No you're trying to play the 1080p card. Save that for a rookie. There are plenty of scalers that'll take a 1080i signal and bump it to 1080p. Do you really think peope give a rip about the extra bug ridden stuff in the Pioneer?

Meanwhile, four studios announce 40+ Blu-Ray titles to HD DVD's 11, the lead time gives other companies a chance to lower prices, and the PS3 (a sure-fire top seller) is still coming down the pike.

What's the pricing. You don't know do you? So you're trying to sell me on a format that's 2x more expensive and you don't even know the pricing of the media. Sure that'll go over well with consumers.

Keep looking down the pike punchy...Blu Ray fans are getting used to it. I'm buying a PS3 myself but I've warned that Blu Ray was going to be expensive and now we're seeing that.

You all know what I know...the cheaper format usually prevails. If HD DVD is $499 now...ask yourself what happens when the Chinese start making them?

[AV_Integrated]

Originally Posted by hmurchison

No you're trying to play the 1080p card. Save that for a rookie. There are plenty of scalers that'll take a 1080i signal and bump it to 1080p. Do you really think peope give a rip about the extra bug ridden stuff in the Pioneer?

Yes, 1080p is the cat's nipples in terms of quality.

Scaled 1080i is not 1080p - 1080p is 1080p and a $2,000 scaler to give sloppy seconds instead of paying $1,800 for the real thing, the first time is just a silly statement.

NOT that the other statements aren't accurate - but that one is false.

I don't consider anything far from over at all though at this point. If PS3 is $500.00 (which we admitedly don't know) then expect about 100,000 Blu-Ray players in people's homes overnight.

Not worth having this debate again though.

[zombieflanders]

Originally Posted by hmurchison

Funny how I'm the Doofus yet you cannot dispute that

1. $499 buys you a HD DVD player but doesn't get you close to Blu Ray

Yet I'm supposed to base things off of "rumor" and some mythical players coming that you haven't a clue about.

Hey, I'm not the one who's claiming that it's all over after only 4 companies have declared prices from the first day.

No you're trying to play the 1080p card. Save that for a rookie. There are plenty of scalers that'll take a 1080i signal and bump it to 1080p. Do you really think peope give a rip about the extra bug ridden stuff in the Pioneer?

Wow, slow up on the espressos there, pal.

What's the pricing. You don't know do you? So you're trying to sell me on a format that's 2x more expensive and you don't even know the pricing of the media. Sure that'll go over well with consumers.

So I assume that you know the pricing on all the players from Sony, Sharp, Sanyo, Mitsubishi, NEC, Philips, Panasonic, and so on? Please, share them with us. It also seems you know the price of the media, which has been mentioned elsewhere as being the same price as HD-DVD. Why don't you share that with us as well?

You all know what I know...the cheaper format usually prevails. If HD DVD is $499 now...ask yourself what happens when the Chinese start making them?

They get crappier?

[Shadowself]

From C|net, David Katzmaier:

"Interestingly, both players--and all forthcoming HD-DVD players--will only output high-definition resolutions via copy-protected HDMI outputs, so people whose HDTVs don't have HDMI or DVI/HDCP inputs won't be able to enjoy the improved image quality of HD-DVD."

So all the people who have HDTV systems which have HDMI or DVI without HDCP incorporated or have component video inputs (and there are LOTS of these systems out there) will be just out of luck.

Wow.

Let's watch our new HD-DVD disk which is natively 1080i and watch it on our one month old HDTV which displays 1080i natively.... but wait... we have to watch it at 480i .... simply because the HDMI and DVI ports on our one month old TV does not incorporate HDCP and the HD-DVD players don't output 720p or 1080i over component video!



Hopefully, Blu-ray will offer systems which get around this stupidity. We can only hope.

Also from C|net, David Katzmaier:"According to Pioneer and Philips, the competing Blu-ray players may still enable high-def output via analog outputs..."

If Blu-ray players support any form of 720p/1080i/1080p that does not require HDCP then there will be a guaranteed subset of consumers which will ONLY buy Blu-ray.

Sounds like a sure market for Blu-ray to capture.

[zombieflanders]

Interesting. You got a link for those quotes?

[James Morrow]

Note that, in order to avoid a number of serious artefacts, 1080i has to be spatially filtered to be, at most, around half the resolution of 1080p ...

[AV_Integrated]

Originally Posted by James Morrow

Note that, in order to avoid a number of serious artefacts, 1080i has to be spatially filtered to be, at most, around half the resolution of 1080p ...

What does that mean? (I really don't know) Thanks.

[Blue]

Back to the original topic HD-DVD for $499. Has anyone taken delivery of one yet? The timing is just a little suspicous. I guess we have a virtual player. Well at least we have 89 virtual titles to go with it! Whilst anyone can get away with charging top dollar they will, as they want to recoup as much R&D as quickly as possible - however I don't think the Blu Ray camp will not sit back and let this player undermine them.

[zombie]

I have no interest in Toshiba products but if they do indeed get a functional HD DVD player out on store shelves for $499, the BDA CEs will have no choice but to price some of their models the same to not lose any momentum in the format war.

[James Morrow]

... it means, AVI, that the effective vertical resolution of 1080i has to be reduced to around 540 lines in order to avoid serious interlacing artefacts - i.e., 1080i has around half the vertical resolution of 1080p, equating to around 1920 by 540 pixel resolution, with non-square pixels. This is why 1080p is so much better than either 720p or 1080i, and why Blu-Ray at 1080p is capable of much higher quality than HD-DVD at 720p/1080i ...

[Knight-Errant]

Originally Posted by James Morrow

... it means, AVI, that the effective vertical resolution of 1080i has to be reduced to around 540 lines in order to avoid serious interlacing artefacts - i.e., 1080i has around half the vertical resolution of 1080p, equating to around 1920 by 540 pixel resolution, with non-square pixels. This is why 1080p is so much better than either 720p or 1080i, and why Blu-Ray at 1080p is capable of much higher quality than HD-DVD at 720p/1080i ...

Ah that's really interesting to know!