Huge Blu Breakthorugh
I haven’t seen this anywhere else, but the Financial Times is reporting this morning, “Wal-Mart will sell the first sub-$130 Blu-ray player in “Black Friday” holiday sales this week after the Thanksgiving holiday.”
The announcement is part of a story on how (foolishly) Hollywood is counting on Blu-ray to revive the ongoingly slacking DVD market.
Ain’t going to happen.
The promise of Blu-ray is much, much smaller than the DVD cash boom. However, it is something and if it adds 2% or 5% to the current market, that will be critically important to an industry that is about to find itself seriously crunched… not because of the content or the lack of an audience or challenges from other media, but because the price of production and distribution is just waaaaaay too high to maintain any kind of reasonable margins at studios. I do not expect audiences to notice too much of a change. In fact, it should all look better and better. But internally, at the studios, agencies, and in the pockets of stars and unions, things are tight and getting tighter. And we are, I would guess, still looking at a short-term correction of over 25% more… and long-term changes that will cut the cost of the industries output by as much as 50%.
But I digress…
Assuming this is accurate, it is HUGE for Blu-ray. Sony has been saying that $300 was the target for this X-Mas and $200 for next X-Mas… and both of those are blown away by an under-$150 machine THIS Christmas.
The real story here, which I will pursue if the WSJ and NYT haven
I watched a Christina Ricci movie on DVD and I shot a WHITE-RAY.
If you know what I mean.
(FUCK was that funny.)
LexG… can we please have a holiday break – at least a week – from any jokes about your bodily fluids? This is not a porn site and your relentlessness is really not fair to people who don’t have the stomach for it.
Damn I just got owned.
Sorry, Dave.
Respect.
Sears & KMart will have the Sony BDPS350 for $179 on Friday.
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6614657.html
David: Production costs? Are we talking entire budgets here, or just DVD / Blu-Ray production costs?
Checked the Black Friday adverts just an hour before this story went up. One possibly overlooked deal is Best Buy selling the highest quality non-writable Blu-Ray ROM drive for only $99. With LCD invading homes like no tomorrow, a nice market segment will rely on computer-based hardware for this next leap as well.
Now that hardware prices are dropping, it’s time for the next logical step: dropping software prices. BDs are still way too expensive. They’ll need to get closer to DVD prices to sell in quantity. Selling cheap players is great, but won’t accomplish much if no one buys the discs to play on them.
David, I think one piece of the pie that a lot of people are missing are the bundles of LCD + BluRay players are going to be flying out the door. Samsung has been pushing their Series 5 LCD TVs (already discounted) with a BluRay player either included for free or $99 (depending on the retailer and the BD player is completely upgradeable to the latest firmware) here in Canada (not sure it’s the same in the US).
For people going hi-def for the first time, and don’t want to wait another year, this couldn’t be a better buying season. Also, I fully expect manufacturer’s to continue slashing prices right through December to try and end their quarters strong.
“we are, I would guess, still looking at a short-term correction of over 25% more… and long-term changes that will cut the cost of the industries output by as much as 50%.”
This seems like the much more significant piece of info to me – will this be expanded upon at some later date?
Up here in Canada, Sony’s BDP-S350 was $250 at Future Shop a couple weeks ago. This also included a bundle of 3 BDs (Kingdom of Heaven, I Robot and The Devil Wears Prada). Not a bad deal, even if you don’t care for the movies. At the Sony Style store I paid about $30 more for the same player a week or two previous of seeing that deal.
I finally saw my first Blu-ray: Ron Fricke’s BARAKA. Unfuckingbelievable.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON looks more unreal. Sold.
With the exception of re-issued/re-mastered films, is there really a need to purchase a blu-ray disc for a film that was initially introduced into the marketplace before the advent of blu-ray technology? “Oh look, Fight Club on Blu-ray.” While I won’t doubt there could be an improvment to clarity and color, I wonder would the full impact of blu-ray be as pronounced as say a blu-ray of Hancock?
I have some classic cinematic masterpieces on DVD such as Once Upon a Time in the West and Lawrence of Arabia, would blu-ray editions of such discs be worth paying for library duplication? Not just paying an extra 2 bucks for the thing when you’re deciding to get it in the first place? Not just a person who’s enthrawled w/films but how about the average consumer? When I think back over some of the films I saw over the summer, Dark Knight and Wanted would be ones I’d pony up for the blu-ray, but say Step Brothers or Get Smart or Tropic Thunder sight unseen, I’d think I’d be satisfied w/a normal dvd.
TO,
I have re-bought a few films on BD that were early DVD releases, like LA Confidential, Nightmare Before Christmas and Dark City.
Overall though I won’t be rebuying much of my collection. The re-mastered Godfather Collection would be an exception though…heck Lawrence of Arabia (the Sony Superbit looks great though) and Once Upon a Time in the West are two of my alltime faves and if the reviews were ecstatic, then I’ll probably consider those as double dips.
My main philosophy though is that I won’t buy something on BD unless it’s something that I really will watch more than a couple times in the future. I already have enough regular DVDs that I probably have only watched once.
And Baraka is awesome.
You gotta be careful just buying willy-nilly on BluRay, I think. I mean….does it really matter if certain films look “better” on BluRay? Like my friend and I were saying earlier….the origirnal TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE cleaned up for BluRay or even the EVIL DEAD movies….c’mon. They lose all charm when they get hi-deffed.
In fact, Wilco just came out against the BluRay of I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART because it’s just not going to *look* any better because it was shot on grainy black and white. Oh! That reminds me…
Does BluRay do anything for sound on a disc??
What do you mean Don? Does it have good SOUND, or does it enhance SOUND? Oh snap! MSNBC is having a LOCK-UP Marathon on Thanksgiving. Yep. All the kids are going to be scared to death if they freakin pass by MSNBC on Thursday.
Back the point: who knows? The player Wal-Mart are selling on Black Friday is not a piece of crap. It’s a rather decent device that has one key thing going for it: RCA OUTPUTS! That’s right! You do not need HDMI to view 1080p content. All you need is freakin RCA cables and a TV with an AUX. So much for going up to Wal-Mart Friday morning.
PS: I STILL CANNOT LOG-IN FREAKIN ONCE AND HAVE IT WORK! BALLS! BALLS ON YOU, TYPEPAD! BALLS!
PSS: Typepad apparently likes Firefox more than Opera, or whatever fine browser you folks use.
PSS: Nope. It does not work with Firefox either.
Yep, TypePad is still bollocks.
Sorry, IO, you’re gonna have to divert those wussified vampyres and send them after TypePad instead of me.
“Oh snap! MSNBC is having a LOCK-UP Marathon on Thanksgiving.”
A LOCK-UP marathon on MSNBC? Really?? That’s almost like the Haley’s Comet of cable-based events. Football? Nah. Parades? Shrug. The one billionth showing of “Lock Up” on MSNBC? Thank YOU, Bill Gates!
(and TypePad, get your fucking act together, you goddamn amateurs…)
I guess I meant does it enhance sound the way it does picture or does it just have plain old good sound?
Apparently it does, since BD uses more advanced audio protocols, but having never heard one, I can’t say what difference it makes compared to a standard DVD with Dolby Digital or DTS. Both DD and DTS have “high-def” versions to go with BD, but as usual you need the right equipment to get the full effects.
Christian, I was walking by one of the best indie DVD stores in the city yesterday and they had the Baraka BD playing on their flat screens. STUNNING. I was only there about ten minutes and I saw someone walk in and ask a) what the movie was b) if it was BluRay and c) what TV they were showing it on. Yeah, it’s that impressive.
“I guess I meant does it enhance sound the way it does picture or does it just have plain old good sound?”
I know a lot of home theater enthusiasts who are MORE excited about the difference in sound between a DVD and a Blu-Ray than they are about the image quality upgrade.
Essentially, when you’re watching a DVD and listening to Dolby Digital or DTS, you’re listening to something akin to an MP3, a highly compressed sound mix that loses a great deal of the power, nuance and soundscape that the original studio mastering contained.
The sound codecs that come with the Blu-Ray, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD and PCM are all lossless, i.e. are uncompressed. You’re listening to essentially the same thing the guy in the mixing studio hears.
The drawback, as Blackcloud correctly notes, is that you need a receiver that is capable of decoding these new sound codecs. The current sweet spot between price and quality is the Onkyo 705: http://www.amazon.com/Onkyo-TX-SR705-Channel-Theater-Receiver/dp/B000OBMX0K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1227656844&sr=8-1
If you do have such a receiver, the difference in sound is incredible. I’ve never been much of an audiophile and was sceptical until I heard the difference myself. Changing on the fly between a Dolby Digital track and a Dolby TrueHD track on the same movie is a surreal experience.
“I guess I meant does it enhance sound the way it does picture or does it just have plain old good sound?”
I know a lot of home theater enthusiasts who are MORE excited about the difference in sound between a DVD and a Blu-Ray than they are about the image quality upgrade.
Essentially, when you’re watching a DVD and listening to Dolby Digital or DTS, you’re listening to something akin to an MP3, a highly compressed sound mix that loses a great deal of the power, nuance and soundscape that the original studio mastering contained.
The sound codecs that come with the Blu-Ray, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD and PCM are all lossless, i.e. are uncompressed. You’re listening to essentially the same thing the guy in the mixing studio hears.
The drawback, as Blackcloud correctly notes, is that you need a receiver that is capable of decoding these new sound codecs. The current sweet spot between price and quality is the Onkyo 705: http://www.amazon.com/Onkyo-TX-SR705-Channel-Theater-Receiver/dp/B000OBMX0K/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1227656844&sr=8-1
If you do have such a receiver, the difference in sound is incredible. I’ve never been much of an audiophile and was sceptical until I heard the difference myself. Changing on the fly between a Dolby Digital track and a Dolby TrueHD track on the same movie is a surreal experience.