My Korea rant: Bluray's crazy player prices

[baccusboy]

As I've mentioned before, I am living in Seoul, South Korea (I'm American though). I am now the owner of a PS3, but as all PS3s here, they are grey imports from Japan. I can get some BR titles at Technomart in Seoul, and maybe a few from online stores, which is great. I can get more from www.auction.co.kr (but these were brought in from outside). I don't seem much HDDVD out there in terms of titles -- almost nothing.

The thing that makes me angry about Korea are the prices, and general lack of availability of BR players in general around here. Sure, you can get a Samsung BD1000 player for about $1,300 US if you know where to look, but those prices are just insane. You can probably find an LG player for the same price if you go to an LG Electronics store.

We have NO sub-$1000 players here. None. None from Sony. None from Phillips. Only Korean brands, and they're priced sky-high. You have to buy them as illegal imports from www.auction.co.kr , or a similar place.

What makes this worse is that Korea is a country with perhaps the highest penetration of LCD/PDP screens in the world (assuming Japan might have a few more per capita).

The only other options are crazy-priced laptops with a BR or HDDVD disc system inside.

We can't even get a Korean PS3 until just before Christmas 2007!

What is going on here? Are they afraid to release the products en-mass locally? It makes me wonder if they're really interested in BR success?

One of my friends thinks that they are not interested in marketing their Samsung product to the wide public, due to known errors and problems with players. I think that's a little off, but I would tend to believe they are more interested in charging outrageous prices for the premium quality, and making a huge profit.

Yes, we're talking about the same BR player you can buy in the USA for like $400. You pay $1,300 for it here! Look at the price, and remember that due to the exchange rate, this unit costs more than it looks: http://www.enuri.com/view/List.jsp?c...cate_keyword=Y

If Samsung is supposed to be one of the major backers of BR, then why aren't they making it readily available to their own people?

If you work for Sony, maybe you should be asking Samsung this question?