BluRay struggling to take off [Article]

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makingmusic476 said:

Bodhesatva said:

makingmusic476 said:

shams said:

"The shift from VHS to DVD a decade ago offered tangible benefits such as significantly improved picture quality and the ability to skip instantly to any scene of the film. However, Blu-ray's improvements over DVD are less pronounced and largely limited to a noticeable but far from extreme increase in picture quality, provided a big screen HDTV is used."

 

I've always disliked this line of reasoning.  While yes, there is less of an incentive to upgrade to Blu-Ray from DVD like there was to upgrade to DVD from VHS, it's also much EASIER to ugprade to Blu-Ray from DVD than it was going to DVD from VHS.

When you buy a Blu-Ray player, all your DVDs will play in the machine, and they'll all look better because of it, due to upscaling.  When you bought a DVD player back in 1998, it made all your VHS tapes obsolete, unless you kept both players around (which many people did).  It also did nothing to increase the quality of the movies you already owned.

In a few years, standalone Blu-Ray players will have dropped to or past the $100 mark.  At this point in time, what will keep people from buying a Blu-Ray player over a regular old DVD player?  Hell, manufacturers could just advertise it as a DVD player, and the few uninformed consumers left would never be the wiser.

Blu-Ray drives will probably end up like DVD drives for PCs today.  They can play practically everything, including obscure formats like DVD-Ram, but that's just about all they make, because it's cheaper for manufacturers to focus on 1-2 SKUs.  That's just what you buy.  You don't track down a CD drive for your PC if you have no interest in playing DVDs.  You just buy the DVD drive.

I pretty much agree with this. On the other hand, that will likely be at least a couple years until that price point is reached, and I'm not sure how studios respond if it actually does take that long. Blech.

I'm not saying I disagree, Makin, I'm just saying I can see things that point in either direction. I am firmly in the "it's very unclear, there are future indicators that point in both directions, and we don't have many statistics that aren't heavily spun, so let's just wait and see" camp.

 

 

The bolded together made me chuckle.

But yeah, I basically agree with you, though I personally feel that the scenario I outlined above is this most likely to happen, out of all those possible.

 

Or would you prefer you don't disagree.