Cost of UHD Blu Ray - Is MS subsidizing Xbone S, or is Sony just milking it?

[Qwark]

drkohler said:

teigaga said:

$15 is a lot when discussing a non essential component for a systems which profit margins are probably less than $50. It could literally eat into half of all their hardware profits this holiday.

Anyway I'm glad for the consumer that Microsoft included a 4k Blu-ray drive for those in the market for one. Buying a standalone disk player in 2016 for hundreds of dollars is really bizzare lol

Very likely the major part of those $15 is royalties for new encoders. The hardware itself only differs in the lens system (higher NA) and faster electronics which probably is a few $.

Standalone uhd players cost so much because there is no competition. I paid $300 for the first cheap China-built cd-player - then other Chinese joined the race.... The Slim reveal already dropped the price of uhd players by $100 over here

To be fair these first players and especially the panasonic are not regular players. The UB900 has better blu ray playback quality then the panasonic bdt700 which launched 2 years before it with a price tag of €500. But it focuses on areas a console or pc doesn't care about.

 

For instance the sound quality, which is as clear as can be, while a console stuffs it trough the motherboard as fast as possible. A dedicated player upconverts chroma using awfully complex algorithms as for removal of unwanted noise jaggies etc. Surely UHD players are expensive but they are top of the line players that don't differ much from the top BD players out there from Sony, Samsung, Panny etc. I would even claim that brands as Marantz and Denon would have a hard time competing with the ub900. They are not making a 200 dollar player into a 700 one by changing it's drive and hdmi output. At worst a 600 one into a 700 one for the extra features.

 

If you don't own a good sound system (€1000 or preferably more) and an expensive TV (which is 4K, 10 bit and supports HDR 10) would wait for a cheaper player. But these players offer more value than most give them credit for.