Engadget has word of new Blu-ray drives from Iodata and Panasonic. Small problem: They’re $850 to $1000 each. No word on how much the media will cost, but I’d expect it to be a small fortune, too.
And what can you play on these drives? For $28.99, each, you can take your pick of The Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby, or Phantom of the Opera. Another dozen or so titles are due in the next six weeks.
This is one time when I really can’t see any good reason to be an early adopter.
Update: In the comments, Chris Lanier points out that the titles I linked above are HD-DVD, not Blu-ray. Thanks, Chris! According to one report, the first Blu-ray releases won’t be available until the end of May. Some of the scintillating titles in that first wave include 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight’s Tale, The Last Waltz, Resident Evil Apocalypse, For a Few Dollars More, and XXX. Man, that’s a sorry list.
Update 2: The PC Doctor says blank media will be more expensive than pre-recorded disks: “Around $20 - $25 for a single 25GB disc (depending on whether the discs are BD-R or BD-RE format). There are also going to be 50GB discs that are going to cost around $50 a disc.” You do not want to burn a coaster at those prices.
4 comments ↓
Those titles are HD DVD, not Blu-ray. And as for the price aspect, Amazon has the The Phantom of the Opera HD DVD for $19.86, The Last Samurai HD DVD for $18.99. Serenity tops the price list at $24.49. Just shop around and you can find the titles for very reasonable prices. There are several other titles for around $24 on Amazon. The prices are really not that bad considering most new DVD releases go for (on average) from $15-21
Chris
Early adopter? I know it isn’t likely to happen, but I still think we consumers should boycott both HD-DVD and Blu-ray until the manufacturers can come up with some sort of unified solution.
I would also like to point out that both recordable CD’s and DVD’s were prohibitvely expensive for some time before they became affordable. Now both formats, with the exception of dual layer DVDs are cheap as heck. I expect that once HD-DVD and BD drives become commonplace in PCs, the media prices will drop as well.
As for the boycott, I would like to agree, but that will just kill BOTH formats, like it did with SACD and DVD-A. For the record, I have a SACD player, and the few titles I DO have are simply awesome, and worthy of their advanced format. I DO NOT want to see the same thing happen to next gen video formats. I will most likely wait a little to see which one has the best titles, but with both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 having these formats, I may end up with both!
Finally, I would like to point out the format war that never made the headlines, but seems to have been avoided peacefully — that between DVD+R and DVD-R. How was this achieved? Universal players and recorders! THAT is what I hope happens to BD and HD-DVD.
I plan to just get the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 and (when the Playstation 3 price goes under $600 for the premium console) the PS3 for BlueRay. I hate how all of the prices are going up. I say we should all just stick to the old stuff. I mean…$600 for a video game console, $1000 for a disc player, and $50 for a disc….I don’t know how stupid these companies think we are but this is crazy and, unless they do something about this…who is going to buy all of this expensive technology anyway?
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