So who would buy a stand alone Blu-Ray player when they could buy a Playstation 3, for cheaper, and get everything else?

poor market penetration for a media format, video game consoles are much much smaller in the scheme of things. In comparison to the money spent on pushing the DVD and its market penetration by this point, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both way behind and hemoraging cash. After all you're trying to sell a new disc format that essentially adds nothing to the movie watching experience except for the less than 10% of the market who own HD TVs

10 million BR players sold? May I also take a toke?

HD DVD and BD market share is currently at a (more or less constant) 40/60 ratio. Given that BD has the PS3 advantage, that's most likely not even close to what Sony was hoping for. Apart from that, nothing has been decided yet, since movies on HD media are still a niche market.

Sony's stand alone player just going off amazon prices is $750 with Toshiba's HD-DVD player at $250 also someone can correct me on this if they know for sure but it was my belief that the only difference between the two formats was in the capacity they could hold with blu-ray disk having information closer to the surface than HD-DVD's allowing more layers and higher capacity but with the codecs supported by both formats being essentially the same. Anyways enough about that as I think this site is much more about video games than media formats even when they do cross over each other occasionally. Was wondering does anyone else out there think of consoles somewhat more like how much enjoyment you will get out of it compared to its cost for example if the PS3 cost 600 and 60 dollars per game and every game you get for it is lets say excellent 1 out of 1 and you buy during its life 20 games it would cost you $1800 over its lifetime and give you by my scale 20 points of amusement. In contrast a system like the Wii cost 250 and 50 dollars per game and lets say every game you get for it is slightly above average lets say 0.75 out of 1 and during its life you buy 20 games that's a total cost at the end of 1250 and a total enjoyment of 15. Now just for the sake of messing with the numbers a bit more lets say you spend as much on your Wii as your PS3 to get the Wii's total price to 1800 that would be an additional 11 games or in the sense of enjoyment if all games are .75 compared to the PS3 1 that adds an additional 8.25 to the Wii's value over its life for a total of 23.25. Anyways just some random thoughts I thought of while reading the chapter in my Econ book on total utility not anything I expect anyone to take for fact but just and interesting thought I thought anyways.

darendt, you'll have to provide a source for that 10 million BD players sold, cause that's a load of bullocks. The majority of BD players on the market are PS3's, and the PS3 has sold about 3.5 million worldwide. The stand-alone player sales for BD are worse than stand-alone HD-DVD players.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070418-dedicated-hd-dvd-players-outsell-blu-ray-counterparts.html
"To mark its first birthday, the HD DVD Promotional Group has announced that sales of dedicated HD DVD players have topped 100,000 in the US. That figure does not include PC HD DVD drives or the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360, giving HD DVD a lead over Blu-ray in the standalone player department (only 25,000 dedicated Blu-ray players had been sold as of January). Of course, if you factor in the over 1.05 million PlayStation 3s with built-in Blu-ray support sold in the US through February, HD DVD's lead disappears."

And, here is a recent article on the disc sales for each:
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN2220834920070423
"Since the high-def format's inception -- HD DVD launched in April 2006, while Blu-ray got rolling two months later -- more than 2.14 million discs have been purchased by consumers: 1.2 million Blu-ray Discs and about 937,500 HD DVDs."

Notice how miniscule that lead is in disc sales. Some Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles only sell 200 copies. Gballzack is right, their market penetration is atrocious.

Anyway, back on topic, the PS3 isn't underrated. It just hasn't matured yet. With it's consumer unfriendly price and lack of any killer apps, there's little reason to pick one up today, unless you are a Blu-ray enthusiast.

And JDWolf, you are right, there is no difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray except the amount of space on both for the reasons you cited. They both support the same codecs. The only other difference is Blu-ray has an extra layer of DRM protection than HD-DVD, BD+.

Quoted for truth... XD

Notice how only the girls agree to that statement.

I don't know where you et your "facts" from.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD both use the exact same codec. The picture quality is almost identical. There is much debate over which has better picture quality but there are no "facts" saying blu-ray or HD-DVD have higher picture quality. 

1) really? Then what's that pile of PS3's doing at my local Myer? I guess someone transported me to USA while I wasn't looking? Oh wait, no I'm still in Australia, and last I looked, PS3's were available here. I haven't been to Europe recently but from what I heard you could buy PS3's there. Looks like PS3 has been released in all three major regions, unlike the PS2, which after 6 months was only released in Japan (but had still sold as many in a 6 month period). And since you were comparngPS2 after 6 months and PS3 after six months, then it's fair to mention that the PS2 was only available in Japan at the time.

2) Yes. Exactly. Sony priced themelves out of this generation. Price does matter and Sony will sell less consoles because they arrogantly thought people would pay any money to play the PS3. Well it's too late to go back and the PS3 is set up to fail. The PS3 will always be the most expensive console with the smallest userbase. Third party publishers don't care how much a console costs, they care how many copies of a game they are going to sell.

When you are comparing the number of sold consoles, then only the number of sold consoles matter. That was the original discussion, wasn't it? You can bring in all these reasons to justify why the PS3 is selling like crap, and of course there are reasons. But you can't seem to bring yourself to actually admit that it's selling like crap. And it is.

I can absolutely tell you that there are no supply problems for the PS3 in Europe. If there are any problems, it's regarding demand, not supply. In Portugal, a store is going to sell the PS3 for 499€ for two days, and another one is selling PS3 + 1 game for 599€. And this is in a country where Sony has always had great domination in console sales...