Also, don't expect prices to come back down anytime soon. So far it looks like we MAY see prices down to $299 by Q4 08, and down to $199 by Q4 09 (this is what sony says anyways). It would drop a lot sooner if they licensed the technologies to other manufacturers who were willing to produce cheaper players.

Also, as noted in the article, none of these players are worth anything because within a year there is a decent chance you won't be able to watch the new movie you want to because you can't update the firmware.

I'm rather sad that blu-ray won because of the way they treat their customers. You shouldn't be obsoleting someones hardware after they spent $1000 on first generation players. I never had to upgrade my DVD players firmware, and I shouldn't have to upgrade any newer players either.

My father still things he can get a Blu-ray player for

mesoteto said: I_own_a_PS3 said: PS3 is better than any other Blu-ray player end of story.

Booo! We want cute aimal pictures!  j/k

Well look at the bright side.
They just made the ps3 look much more desirable.

I remember when people where claiming the ps3's blu-ray drive would become a non-factor once stand alones reaches mass market price, guess that's not happening anytime soon.
Imagine if they also dropped the ps3's price again...

Oh, the irony! Sony supporters attacking Toshiba for selling their product at a loss as "an unhealthy business model"!

You really set yourself up for that one, akuma.

what a joke. Sure, circle the wagons and jerk into a circle....but am i the only rational person who can step back and realize the spin of this article? They are citing holiday sales prices IMMEDIATELY after xmas from the beginning of january.....and now non sale prices and claiming costs are RISING......ugh, use some common sense, people.....th eprices havent climbed at all, they are simply returning to their normal price after holiday sales. Blind hatred without knowledge is terrible....never once was the MSRP cut on player prices officially, they were packaged or dropped as sales for the holiday....never a permanant price drop. FUD at its finest.

It seems like a lot of you guys don't remember early DVD player prices.
The blu-ray prices will come down eventually.

@ Disolotude, @$99 a player, there were no other contenders -_-; You can't compete with a company that's throwing themselves into a financial well to keep they're merchandise obscenely below what the competition is offering. Why do you think there were like 10 company's actively producing blu-ray players, and only Toshiba, the HD-DVD addon for the 360, and maybe like 1 or 2 "high ends". Believe me, if Toshiba won, the prices would have shot up MUCH higher than what they were going for. Company's need to make profit on this stuff -_-

@Nordlead, ok maybe 1 percent of people even interested in home entertainment bought a player that will "obsolete it's self", the HD market is currently tiny. Any early adapter has to take these kinds of risks, you may not know this, but many of the early dvd players would often break due to new technology, laser's wouldn't quite read right, the disc trays would be quirky, it happens. What's important now is what a format designed with both movie, game, and data purpose in mind can do for us. I hardly consider that being obsolete -_-;

The PS3 is the best and cheapest BR player on the market and all the high prices will do is push more people to buy PS3's for the time being. Inevitably, the prices of the standalone players will come down later in the year and they will have to come down below the price of the PS3 soon (i.e in the next 6-12 months) or they will not sell any.

It will be a while before $5 BR films are on the market, but come on how long was it before $5 DVD's were on the market. Actually on a timescale basis, I reckon the cost of BR's is actually cheaper comparatively speaking compared to DVD's at the same timeframe.

In the UK, you can pick up BR's for as cheap as £10 at the moment...and I know for a FACT...it was much much longer with DVD before that happened.

 I might be mistaken, but I thought that profile 1.1 added picture-in-picure and profile 2.0 enabled optional internet content.  As far as I know every player should be able to watch every movie in the future.  It is the extra features that may not be accessable.  Can anyone confirm this?

An awful amount of people on this site have such negative dispositions to anything Sony related. Truly unbelievable.

 I'm totally fine with this. New technology is not supposed to be cheap. DVD was also pretty expensive when it come out. The problem is that the HDDVD vs BR war delayed the adoption of a new format and forced the prices down. Now the war is over and the adoption process will be similar to what we used to from the past (B&W TV->Color TV, VHS->DVD and now DVD->BR).

It will be expensive for the first couple of years and not everyone will be able to afford it (if you "poor" stay with DVD, stay away from new tech), then it will drop price and become mainstream.

Are you guys too young to remember when DVD come out? DVD movies were more expensive than VHS movies, DVD players were way more expensive than VHS players and DVD could not even write to media while VHS could. Then DVD got cheap and the expensive DVD devices were the one's that could write DVDs. Now  even DVD re-writers are dirt cheap.

 I see a similar process for BR. First only a few people will buy BR devices and movies (first 2 years - 08/09), in 09 the prices will drop hard and an "affordable" (read it as expensive, rofl) BR-RW device will be released, then in 2011+, alsmost everyone will be able to afford a BR-RW and use it to play movies, backup their sh*t (even digital movie downloads), record TV shows, etc, etc, etc.

I'm looking forward to the days where I can backup my stuff to a 150Gb BR media. I could care less if Blu-ray replaces DVD or not, for me it already did (I only buy BR movies since Toshiba dropped the ball on HDDVD).  Now I just need a BR-RW drive to use BR for my personal backups.