Wal-Mart To Only Sell Blu-ray DVDs

The real reason you get $99 dollar HD-DVD is because Toshiba is paying people to take them, they are losing a lot on each one they sell, this is also why no one else built HD-DVD players. Toshiba completely ruined the market. Basically Toshiba failed to build alliances on every front. They didn't learn from sonys previous mistakes, but sony did.

All the blu ray makers (and there are many) are building players as a sustainable buisness, making a profit on them. So the prices will follow the natural drop of electronics, I am betting $200 by the end of this year. That will be low enough for me.

I know a lot of people who paid $600+ for a DVD player. Heck I paid that much for a VCR.

This is just the normal cycle. Get in early, pay more and have more problem, wait and you get lower prices and smoother operations.
 
How much money did the Blu Ray Group give to the Wal-Mart powers that be this time?

I wouldn't be suprised if they didnt get anything. Walmart is a bit weird, its the largest store anywhere, not just in numbers but physical size. I dont see too many other 1/4-million square foot stores selling stuff. You would think, with all of that space they would have a variety of items... but, from what ive seen, anything that doesnt sell is removed and they either stock more of the same crap, or bring in new crap.

They cut my hours, they cut HD-DVD... what next? :p
 
I seriously doubt it will happen at $98. Remember that the HD-A2 was 1080i only. Even if HD-DVD did win, that still means you bought something for a 720p TV only. The Oppo 1080p upscaling DVD player will upscale regular DVDs better than the HD-A2 or HD-A3.

Maybe not, but I think you missed my point--I'm not talking about a literal match to the A2. My only point was this: I won't be in until there is a Blu-Ray player (perhaps low-end) at a very low price point, as in the ballpark of $100. I'm just not willing to spend $300-$400 for a DVD player.
 
Our position on this since the beginning has been that just because one format beats the other one, that doesn't mean it "won" anything. It still has standard DVDs to contend with.
Sure it has. It won the high def/next gen war. If you want High-Def media, you got Blu-Ray. That's it. There's nothing else.

DVD you say? Well I didn't see anyone saying DVD didn't win anything when it beat DIVX, because VHS outsold it for years. High Def discs, I believe, is being adopted faster than DVD was when it was released. I remember reading Blu-Ray by itself reached 1 million discs sold faster than DVD did.

Plain and simple, Blu-Ray won. Its going to take over. The people who control the media want you to buy another disk. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.
 
WRONG! You obviously don't understand the difference between 1080i and 1080p or how modern displays work.

You would be VERY hard pressed to see the difference. If anything, very fast horizontally moving images the might appear to flow smoother in 1080p, and that's it. The resolution is the same bud. So no, the HD-A2 is not just for 720p screens.

If that's the case, then the HD-A2 and HD-A3 are not as good at upscaling as the Oppo. I'm not saying this from some technical standpoint. I'm saying this from what I have seen with my own eyes on a 46" Samsung 1080P LCD HDTV. The Oppo 980H looks better hands down. Supposedly the 983H looks even better, but I have not seen it.

A good search on AVSForum will lead you to the same conclusion. Oppo and Denon both make upscaling DVD players that are superior to the 720p/1080i HD-DVD players.
 
Maybe not, but I think you missed my point--I'm not talking about a literal match to the A2. My only point was this: I won't be in until there is a Blu-Ray player (perhaps low-end) at a very low price point, as in the ballpark of $100. I'm just not willing to spend $300-$400 for a DVD player.

I agree, since everyone has their own price. I purchased a stand alone Toshiba DVD player at $200. To me, that price would be perfectly reasonable for a stand alone Blu-Ray player.

I don't think anyone here is going to touch a Blu-Ray player outside of the PS3 anytime soon though since we already know what format changes are coming up.
 
If that's the case, then the HD-A2 and HD-A3 are not as good at upscaling as the Oppo. I'm not saying this from some technical standpoint. I'm saying this from what I have seen with my own eyes on a 46" Samsung 1080P LCD HDTV. The Oppo 980H looks better hands down. Supposedly the 983H looks even better, but I have not seen it.

A good search on AVSForum will lead you to the same conclusion. Oppo and Denon both make upscaling DVD players that are superior to the 720p/1080i HD-DVD players.

And they should be considering they're $170 compared to $98 for the HD-A2, and don't even play any high-def formats.
 
I agree, since everyone has their own price. I purchased a stand alone Toshiba DVD player at $200. To me, that price would be perfectly reasonable for a stand alone Blu-Ray player.

I don't think anyone here is going to touch a Blu-Ray player outside of the PS3 anytime soon though since we already know what format changes are coming up.

Right... my number was a little out of thin air, just to compare to the late-2007 deals on the A2. Another poster had some good points too on why/how Toshiba was able to get the players down that low. $200 might be still a little high, but I guess one of my hesitations at spending much more than $98 was the uncertainty. Now that we have resolved that issue, essentially, perhaps something closer to $200 might be doable. Lord knows I've spent a lot more than $100 on my older DVD players! :)

One can hope the player companies will now engage one another in the normal competition that will bring the costs down. We'll have to see what the market does over the next few months on that front.
 
Why do people always complain about price. Weren't DVD players about 500 bucks when they first came out? You can buy one for 30 bucks now. A few years from now they will be more reasonable.
 
Not really, Canada is still having alot of support for HD-DVDs

If the reports are correct and Toshiba pulls out...it doesn't matter how many HD DVD consumer supporters are left around the world...Without Toshiba, HD DVD is completely dead for new media and hardware.
 
There is no DVD vs Blu-Ray war because Blu-Ray is the replacement for DVD just like DVD is the replacement for VCD.

Blu-Ray is the next format, it has more storage capacity, a better image quality, and a higher bandwidth than DVD. Sooner or later DVD will be obsolete and Blu-Ray will be the next storage medium.

Blu-Ray will replace the DVD, not fight against DVD because it is superior to DVD, just look at the audio track alone, a movie on a dvd uses a lossy compression for the audio and the best compression available for DVD is DTS 96/24 which encodes a 5.1 audio to fit in a dual channel 96KHz 24bit stream however normally a DVD will only use the lossy AC-3(Dolby Digital) compression which fit in a 5.1 audio into a dual channel 48KHz 16bit stream. An audio track on a Blu-Ray disc is normally an uncompressed 6 channel 96KHz 24bit stream but with lossless compression like TrueHD, it can easily deliver an 8 channel 96KHz 24bit audio stream.

The war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray is the real war, it is the fight to be TEH format that should replace DVD and like it or not, Blu-Ray is winning that war. Blu-Ray doesn't need to win against DVD because actually there is no war between DVD and Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray will be the replacement for DVD since HD DVD is already losing the replacement format war.

A VCD is cheaper than a DVD but the DVD still replaces it so Blu-Ray will also replace the DVD even when DVD is cheaper. I think that people who think Blu-Ray won't win against DVD are just disappointed HD DVD supporters who would like to dream that Blu-Ray would fail like their HD DVD.
 
There is no DVD vs Blu-Ray war because Blu-Ray is the replacement for DVD just like DVD is the replacement for VCD.

Blu-Ray is the next format, it has more storage capacity, a better image quality, and a higher bandwidth than DVD. Sooner or later DVD will be obsolete and Blu-Ray will be the next storage medium.

Blu-Ray will replace the DVD, not fight against DVD because it is superior to DVD, just look at the audio track alone, a movie on a dvd uses a lossy compression for the audio and the best compression available for DVD is DTS 96/24 which encodes a 5.1 audio to fit in a dual channel 96KHz 24bit stream however normally a DVD will only use the lossy AC-3(Dolby Digital) compression which fit in a 5.1 audio into a dual channel 48KHz 16bit stream. An audio track on a Blu-Ray disc is normally an uncompressed 6 channel 96KHz 24bit stream but with lossless compression like TrueHD, it can easily deliver an 8 channel 96KHz 24bit audio stream.

The war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray is the real war, it is the fight to be TEH format that should replace DVD and like it or not, Blu-Ray is winning that war. Blu-Ray doesn't need to win against DVD because actually there is no war between DVD and Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray will be the replacement for DVD since HD DVD is already losing the replacement format war.

A VCD is cheaper than a DVD but the DVD still replaces it so Blu-Ray will also replace the DVD even when DVD is cheaper. I think that people who think Blu-Ray won't win against DVD are just disappointed HD DVD supporters who would like to dream that Blu-Ray would fail like their HD DVD.

no its because i finally have put a damn dent in replacing all the damn VHS movies with DVD and now im gonna have to choke up 1k's of hard earn cash to once again repalce this crap again.
 
RIP HD-DVD... probably the best thing to happen to the Battle between the two "unwanted-by-the-general-public" HiDef disc formats... a winner has now unequivocally been crowned.

Of course this *has* to come the day *after* I finally receive the 5 free HD-DVD's from the 360 add-on drive that I bought in late AUGUST! Anybody want to buy a 360 HD-DVD addon? ;-)

The bad part of having a winner is that blu-ray players will probably stay above $300 for quite a while.
 
no its because i finally have put a damn dent in replacing all the damn VHS movies with DVD and now im gonna have to choke up 1k's of hard earn cash to once again repalce this crap again.

The good news is you don't need to replace your collection! Your DVD movies will still work in your new high definition player.


I wonder how long it will take for Paramount to get out of their HD-DVD contract.
 
Well now that Walmart is officially in the mix here, I think *hope* that they will have a LONG talk with Sony et all about the price of players.
With the amount of inventory walmart can carry, they have a HUGE influence over the pricing of what they carry.

EG: They told Dixie (I think) that they could ONLY add 1/2c to their price even though their supplies went up about 5c.
They said no, got dropped and after about 6mths asked back in, at that price.

This SHOULD mean that decent players will be in the stores at about $150 by mid year
 
I'm really not enormously concerned about it, so long as I can play the HD DVD's I own for the foreseeable future.

I really want a download service above all else. I think that will be the ultimate future of most physical media.

Incidentally, I couldn't find more than a few high def discs in either format at the local Wal Mart even before this was announced.
 
RIP HD DVD. Good effort, supporting SD and HD was invaluable.

Bring your hd dvd to a friends house...but wait he only has a regular dvd player. Thats ok, ill just flip the disk over and play it SD. Bring your blu ray disk over to a friends house..sorry sam we cant watch the movie, you didnt spend $400 on a blu ray player. We will just sit around and do nothing.


Toshiba had the solution. Buy and A3 HD - DVD Player, get 7 free HD DVDs. It upconverts all your old dvd's and plays new HD - DVDs. You only need one Digital Disk Player. Buy a Blu - Ray player, and now keep to players around, dvd and blu ray. Making you buy more shit.
 
Blu-Ray is the next format, it has more storage capacity, a better image quality, and a higher bandwidth than DVD. Sooner or later DVD will be obsolete and Blu-Ray will be the next storage medium.

Blu ray only offers an unnoticable bandwith gain over HD DVD. If you watched the same movie on BD and HD DVD, both say on a high end 70" DLP tv with 7.1 audio on some Defintive speakers, you wouldnt tell a difference. BD does offer more theoretical storage then hd dve though, although now, BD and HD DVD are, for all practical purposes, equal. Producers only release 3 versions of each movie for the public.

1. SD Full Screen
2. SD Widescreen
3. HD (Which is either stored on HD DVD or BD.) As of now, the media on both HDDVD and BD are the same. If and when BD wins the war, then the full capacity of the BD will be taken advantage of, because then post production can master just one image for the BD, and not worry about it being compatible with HD - DVD and BD.
 
Wouldn't it be ironic if HD-DVD died within days of the writer's strike ending...

And then it was announced that the entire negotiations were over how much of a cut the writers were going to get from future HD-DVD sales?

Is this thought really that far-fetched?
 
RIP HD DVD. Good effort, supporting SD and HD was invaluable.

Bring your hd dvd to a friends house...but wait he only has a regular dvd player. Thats ok, ill just flip the disk over and play it SD. Bring your blu ray disk over to a friends house..sorry sam we cant watch the movie, you didnt spend $400 on a blu ray player. We will just sit around and do nothing.


Toshiba had the solution. Buy and A3 HD - DVD Player, get 7 free HD DVDs. It upconverts all your old dvd's and plays new HD - DVDs. You only need one Digital Disk Player. Buy a Blu - Ray player, and now keep to players around, dvd and blu ray. Making you buy more shit.

Well, you could use some of your probably absent intelligence and just ask before bringing over your disc.

Also, every Blu-ray player known to man plays dvd's and upconverts them... I don't get your point?
 
Wouldn't it be ironic if HD-DVD died within days of the writer's strike ending...

And then it was announced that the entire negotiations were over how much of a cut the writers were going to get from future HD-DVD sales?

Is this thought really that far-fetched?

Haha...I do wonder if some of the negotiations were about how much cut the writers were going to get off of BD/HD DVD sales.
That would be horrible lol:eek:
 
Why do people always complain about price. Weren't DVD players about 500 bucks when they first came out? You can buy one for 30 bucks now. A few years from now they will be more reasonable.

???

Because few people that Wal-Mart cater to are interested in spending $400 on a BR DVD player. Wal-Mart shoppers had a sub $100 option into the HD market with HD-DVD players. You can't expect them to pay $400 for the same thing?

I was close to pulling the trigger on a sub $100 HD player. I hate to say it but I'm siding with Wal-Mart shoppers on this one. I but I'm not buying BR at current prices because there is no value in the investment over standard DVD players.
 
Well, you could use some of your probably absent intelligence and just ask before bringing over your disc.

Also, every Blu-ray player known to man plays dvd's and upconverts them... I don't get your point?

BDP's play dvds? didnt realize that then...my mistake. I was given false information from a best buy employee then.
 
There is no DVD vs Blu-Ray war because Blu-Ray is the replacement for DVD just like DVD is the replacement for VCD.

Blu-Ray is the next format, it has more storage capacity, a better image quality, and a higher bandwidth than DVD. Sooner or later DVD will be obsolete and Blu-Ray will be the next storage medium

There is no image quality difference between the two formats...squint all you want. :rolleyes:

I won't even bother with the bandwidth matter because it's irrelevant. Concerning storage capacity? Hey Einstein. Hard drive capacity is THE storage medium. They're cheap, fast and HUGE.
 
Wal-Mart?
I hate WalMart! The last place to be on the first and 15th of the month.
But they are the FAT LADY. So all you HD-DVD folks need to find eBay fast!
 
Blu ray only offers an unnoticable bandwith gain over HD DVD. If you watched the same movie on BD and HD DVD, both say on a high end 70" DLP tv with 7.1 audio on some Defintive speakers, you wouldnt tell a difference. BD does offer more theoretical storage then hd dve though, although now, BD and HD DVD are, for all practical purposes, equal. Producers only release 3 versions of each movie for the public.

1. SD Full Screen
2. SD Widescreen
3. HD (Which is either stored on HD DVD or BD.) As of now, the media on both HDDVD and BD are the same. If and when BD wins the war, then the full capacity of the BD will be taken advantage of, because then post production can master just one image for the BD, and not worry about it being compatible with HD - DVD and BD.
There is no image quality difference between the two formats...squint all you want. :rolleyes:

I won't even bother with the bandwidth matter because it's irrelevant. Concerning storage capacity? Hey Einstein. Hard drive capacity is THE storage medium. They're cheap, fast and HUGE.

You two need to squint hard because I said that Blu-Ray is better than DVD, not HD DVD :rolleyes: . I said that because some people think that even if Blu-Ray has won the HD war, it would have a difficult time fighting against DVD.

Before this, either HD DVD or Blu-Ray could or would replace DVD but now there is no question that Blu-Ray would be the next format whether you like it or not. The HD war is over and there is no war against DVD because DVD will sooner or later be replaced by the winning HD format. DVD won't stand a chance against Blu-Ray with just cheaper price alone because the price of the HD format will drop just like the price of DVD has dropped before this.

I just hope that people will realise that DVD will be obsolete soon and Blu-Ray will be the next medium at least for the next 3-4 years. You can try to ease yourself by saying that upconverted DVD or HD download is the way to go for you after HD DVD has lost the war but you are not bluffing anyone else except yourself because you know that DVD is an inferior format compared to the HD format and you also know how long it would take to download a 25GB 1080P movie with the current internet connection.
 
I forgot to say that you can nag as much as you want on how Sony paid to get the supports for their format, how the player price is too high and how the Blu-Ray profile is rushed or incomplete, but that won't change the fact that their format is now winning the war and I think that it is time to move on already.

Some people like me would like to be an early adopter so we are also willing to pay for the higher price, if you are not willing to pay the price as an early adopter, you can stick with DVD for now but when the HD format price drops in the future, you should know that you won't be buying an HD DVD to replace your DVD then when the format is almost gone now :eek: .
 
In the end it doesn't matter because...well, here's my take on it:

1. A good number of people today don't even HAVE HDTV's capable of supporting 1080p because they can't even justify the PRICE of them. Why spend nearly a grand or more on a new 32" TV when they can get a 32" regular tube TV for at most a little over half that? The result then will be that people will stick to and hold onto DVD as long as they can until they literally have no CHOICE but to upgrade everything they have. I mean, there are people who come into my store asking if we carry any movies on VHS! Do you think trying to convince these same people to move to high def is even going to be possible? And even if they do have HDTVs, a lot of them may have ones that go only to 720p or 1080i. My cousin's husband got a 73" HDTV that does 1080i but not 1080p. If I remember correctly, he got it just before 1080p was the new kid on the block. Do you think you're going to convince him that he needs to upgrade again after he plunked down all that money? Most likely not. Anyone who has a 1080i TV is going to go about this one of two ways: Upgrade so they can stay current, or say screw it and wait until the TV dies on them and it's not cost effective to try and get it repaired.

2. The average joe doesn't understand the meaning of good cables. They see Monster cable, freak out at the price, and then find the cheapest shit on the shelf and then get pissed off because the cable can't do 1080p, rather than find an affordable brand that can. They end up convinced that high def is bullshit, because they just don't see the benefit when their TV, no matter how much they ultimately paid for it, "doesn't work right". I wouldn't be surprised if half the TV returns in retail come down to shitty cables causing the image to be messed up.

3. Lack of competition will mean the prices probably won't go down as long as people are willing to pay the price for them. Photoshop costs as much as it does because everything else compared to it is a joke! Windows Vista Ultimate in a retail box costs as much as it does because nothing else even comes close to that kind of demand, except maybe a previous version of Windows. There are cheaper and arguably better alternatives to the iPod, but people are still willing to plunk down the cash for one over said alternatives. We see it here even on the HD vs BD camp - Sure, the HD DVD camp has more affordable stuff, and more reason to do it their way. But it isn't HD that is winning over the studios, or the consumer in general.

4. Even if the prices come down just to shovel BD into the market, DVD prices will fall thusly to get rid of whatever stock is left. But because the DVD will still be in demand, it'll be awhile before they stop making movies in DVD format just to meet that demand and make -some- kind of money off it. This isn't like VHS vs. DVD where a smaller, more space-managable disc and a relatively smaller case for it equates to more shelfspace (and more places to lose them!) . Sure the BD case is smaller, but the disc itself is not. The case is not so much significantly smaller that you'll have a crapton of space, unless you have a really extended shelf or an entire wall for your movies, where you would most definitely see the benefit. It's going to take more than high definition to convince people to move over. Especially when early adopters that don't own a PS3 are getting screwed by a specification that isn't even finalized.

5. Look at how many times Sony revises things. The Playstation had its share of revisions. The Playstation 2 is at how many model revisions? Wikipedia cites 15 or so. The Playstation 3 in less than two years is already at 4 different models, two of which are discontinued, all of them with their own variations in hardware. Knowing that, do you think Sony is going to ever finalize the Blu-Ray spec? Maybe when there's no more competition and DVDs aren't even sold anymore. Till then, my guess is going to be that they'll keep revising it until they release a specification that significantly draws consumers to it (and the lawsuits for screwing people over with not being able to simply upgrade their BD players to the latest spec settle down)

Me personally, I am going to at least wait until the BD spec is finalized, for sure, and that's even -if- I want to go to HD media. That, and affordability. I feel that any movie title costing me more than $15 should have more than one disc in it and at the very least better have a damn blooper reel with the deleted scenes. Better yet? Put everything into the film. Final cut, no edits, just everything from start to finish, and no need to even find the deleted scenes bonus feature. I don't care how much time and money and hell went into making the movie. It if it had a multi-million or billion dollar budget behind it, chances are someone went through hell to make it worth every penny, so it only makes sense to me that you put the whole fricking movie IN IT! I don't care about interviews because most of them blab about the most boring shit that nobody can understand or relate to unless they are in the business. I wanna see some funny shit that happened offscreen if you're going to give me any kind of 'special feature' at all.

That's about all I can rant about. I'm over-caffienated at the moment so my mind is everywhere.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
I find it amazing how people despite all that has happened still try and find negatives or say that this wasn't a winning campaign for Sony.

This is by and large a 100% WIN and Success for the Sony party, you are blind to think otherwise.
Thats all I have to say as these rantings have gone on 500 threads now so im sure I will just get bashed by people who dislike Blu-ray if I say anymore
 
Why compare DVD with VHS? We had VCD before we had DVD and DVD didn't have any competiton but the price still went down and people still buy DVDs to replace their VCDs, the same thing would happen with Blu-Ray, having a single winning format is better than having two because people will move on faster to a new format when they only have one to choose from.
 
I don't understand the HD-DVD crowd. They could have won, or at least really give blue ray a better run if:
  • In the beginning, they set up deals to make it manatory to have studios release only combo DVDs- regulare DVD on one side, HD-DVD on the other. Or have one of each inside the same package, buy one you HAVE to buy the other. That would have helped tremendously with market penetration.
  • sell the players for cheaper. I know they're cheap now, and they always were a bit cheaper then the blueray, but the should have come out of the gate with a $250 high end, $150 low end models. The low end needs to play the HD-DVD as well as upconvert (only fairly well) normal DVDs. That way people can see the difference between them, and see the value of their purchase. I wouldn't want the upconverting to be too good :D
  • advertise more aggresively. For every HD-DVD ad I saw, I saw 4 for bluray.
  • make a deal with microsoft to have the HD-DVD player come with the Xbox-360 instead as an add-on. This was a monumentel fuckup of the HD-DVD camp.
  • Have combo discs for the xbox, esp for game tie ins with movies. imagine, on one side is the game, on the other is the movie in HD-DVD. such as wasted opportunitty.:(
  • Come out with a $100 to $150 player/recorder for PC and MAC. Have it be SATA. Get the media out there, and subsidize it to make the discs $5 each, at to start with.

They coulda been a contender, if only..........
 
[*]make a deal with microsoft to have the HD-DVD player come with the Xbox-360 instead as an add-on. This was a monumentel fuckup of the HD-DVD camp.

[*]Have combo discs for the xbox, esp for game tie ins with movies. imagine, on one side is the game, on the other is the movie in HD-DVD. such as wasted opportunitty.:(
QUOTE]

I don't agree with these two things at all.

If Microsoft made a deal to have an HD-DVD player in the 360, all it would have done is drove the cost of the 360 up another $100 or so for an *unproven* technology. Then, if HD-DVD still ended up losing, all new 360 owners would be paying for dead technology. MS said time and time again they didn't want to drive the cost of the 360 up when there was no clear winner in the format wars - that was a good move.

Combo discs for the 360 would have resulted in higher priced games, and games are priced high enough as it is. All that would do is piss people off and yell for a cheaper, game only version, and the combo discs would just get clearanced. I sure as hell don't want to pay $15 more for a Chronicles of Riddick combo disc, because while the game is cool, the movie sucked, imo.

MS could have jeopardized everything if they backed HD-DVD, so they took the safe route, and it seemed to have work for them.
 
I don't understand the HD-DVD crowd. They could have won, or at least really give blue ray a better run if:
  • Have combo discs for the xbox, esp for game tie ins with movies. imagine, on one side is the game, on the other is the movie in HD-DVD. such as wasted opportunitty.:(

    They coulda been a contender, if only..........


  • Funny thing is that the only place I've seen that happen is with Stranglehold Collector's Edition for the PS3. It has the game and the movie in one Blu-ray disc.
 
Back
Top