| NATO said:
Soooo... you're saying AEP, Grundig, Palsonic, Orion and Lenoxx aren't shitty brands? and even if we use only the links you provided in the OP.. those cheap players they were looking at, what brands were they exactly?... Apex, GE, Zenith, and then a cheap low end Samsung which still cost more than the price of a PS2 outsode of the US anyway.. Footnotes: 1) Australian market is a captive one so products without immediate nationally available competition, end up subject to large markups, consoles have historically had a large markup in Australia on account of there never really being more than three manufacturers at any given time, where as the DVD market at the time was awash with players from a wide range of brands each with a wide range of models, and price reductions were rife to compete on the market, thus doesnt happen with consoles in Australia and never has, which is why Australian gamers specifically, get shafted. 2) Even if you factor in the above and apply it specifically to DVD players as if they suffered the same sort of markups, the USD, US launch price of PS2 was $299, the USD, AU launch price of PS2 was $456, a markup of $157 or roughly 32%, even if you take that metric and remove the markup from the player prices listed in USD converted, the result is still the same, none of the players would be under $200. 3) In some regions DVD player usage was still so much in it's infancy that only specialist stores carried them, take for example the UK, it's biggest and most popular catalog store, Argos, back in the late 90s, early 2000s was the primary method which most people in the UK would buy products, and yet in the spring/summer 1999 catalog, dvd players weren't even listed for sale. - Yet within 9 months customers in the UK could buy the PS2 with dvd playback. Your entire premise for the thread is that the feature wasn't a big deal and that it wasn't a big selling point for the console, because at the time no-name budget brands, in heavilly discounted sales, were cheaper, that's a rediculously stupid argument, for a start, it would depend on waiting for such sales, availability etc, just to pay half the price of a Ps2 for some dodgy chinese off-brand unit, show me a good brand dvd player for under $250 in early 2000, that was a general in store retail price, go ahead, just try. That's before you even venture into the "dual purpose, dual recipient" side of things, think of how many parents thought to themselves, "we can buy our son/daughter a games console AND a cheap dvd player, at the same time?, for much less than the $600-$2000 we spent on our livingrooms dvd player only a couple years ago?" - At the time dvd prices were still on the way down due to heavy stuffing from shitty brands pushing crap into the market to capitolize, often with terrible image quality or composite video out, making the image quality even worse. Then suddenly, PS2, that supports not only DVD but component output, DTS sound, SPDIF and on top of all that, plays the latest and greatest games? Whether you like it or not, DVD was a big deal for the PS2 launch, the fact that even the article you based this thread on mentions people specifically waiting for the PS2 to release, to use as a DVD player only further demonstrates that. And in the end, your unwillingness to talk about standalone DVD players at anything other than their discounted/cheapest-brand prices, while at the same time being unwilling to talk about the PS2 by anything other than it's launch price, shows a heavy bias, hell you even go as far as mentioning a $18 dvd player black friday ad, for something released 4 years after the PS2, and what amazing brand unit was that?, Norcent.. who I'm sure everyone here has heard of and knows for their quality, reliable products.. |
[stands up, begins slow clap]
