Blu-ray still facing serious adoption troubles

In my humble opinion, the 'victory' of blu ray over hd dvd extinguished any chance of having a widely disseminated successor to the classic dvd format. I learned that blu ray technology was superior and personally preferred it, even though it required an increased investment in the existing production infrastructures. I did not guess that it would not became an instant success because of political reasons...

i dont mind shellin gout 200 for a player if the stupied new release moves wernt 30-35 bucks a pop. that is retarded. once they get below 20 (like a nomral dvd) i will buy a player.

kingdingdong said:
i dont mind shellin gout 200 for a player if the stupied new release moves wernt 30-35 bucks a pop. that is retarded. once they get below 20 (like a nomral dvd) i will buy a player.

Click to expand...

Makes sense to me.

Could it possibly be that "less than $200" IS the problem? When DVD players are selling for $50, only people with lots of disposable cash will buy BR.

I own a BR Player but still do not own a BR disk. It not worth it to me to pay an extra 10 to 15 bucks to get a movie in BR. I rent movies all the time in BR because there is little to no difference in cost. If it was the same to own I would be buying BR instead

BluRay has two insurmountable problems:
1) Embedded DRM (AACS, etc.) - that nobody with an IQ above 90 will touch (unless they are masochists)
2) HDCP/HDMI - which just doesn't reliably work, and has a new connector design every 18 months.


No thanks.

The people who buy $50 DVD players probably won't see any difference going to a $200 Blu-ray player because all the players getting to that price point and the equipment it's likely plugged into will be of poor quality anyway. Clearly there's a market for people who'll buy anything blindly because it's cheap and they would be oblivious to better picture and sound quality. Hence, spending more money for basically what will be the same product to them is hardly justified.

People I know either own a PS3 or own upscaling DVD players which do an extremely good job improving the quality of DVDs. I havent watched an upscaled DVD on a big telly and thought "That picture is crap".

Also the price of second hand DVDs is through the floor. I usually go through the pre-owned bin at Blockbusters and find 5 cool DVDs for £10. That is roughly $14?

A Blu-Ray player and disc need a good-enough HDTV for the complete experience. If you don't have an HDTV, don't buy a Blu-Ray player. IMO it's as simple as that.

The reason that Blu-Ray is not taking off is that saving HD video to a hard drive is the much better way to go. Disc oxidize in 5 years and quality is lost.

Like guest further up said. The DRM and HDCP implementation is the issue. The quality may be awesome, but the hardware and software that powers it is third rate. The second is of course as mentioned, the cost of the Blu-Ray's themselves. New releases that come out near $50 (Australian) is a joke. It costs less than that for three or four people to go to the cinema's.
Cut the copyright protection, scrap the regional coding and the price to produce will naturally be cheaper.
Either that or bring back HD-DVD........

Blue ray player is a one time investment. The main problem is the price of the blue ray disk. Here in india a xbox 360 pro and a ps3 80 gb both costs 24K rupees. But a xbox 360 game costs 1900 and a ps3 game costs 2500. Thats a gap of 12 to 15 us dollers. So xbox 360 is more populer. A movie dvd goes for 100, but blue ray would have costed 600. So they dont even release hd titles here.

oh lol i forgot i got a blue ray drive in my dell studio xps desktop kind of forgot i owned it since i dont have any blue ray disks.. have borrowed a couple tho. they look good but not light years away from dvds upscaled with my 360 (26inch hd telly here so larger would make a difference).

Blueray - so cool i forgot i had it..

I think winning the format war may be the worst nightmare for Blu-Ray. All Blu-Ray got from winning that was the fact they get to stay of shelves longer, it doesn't mean its going to see success and it doesn't mean its a good format.

I was saying the same exact thing Tengeta, I personally stream my movies onto my HDTV w/ netflix and xbox 360, I'm absolutely sick of my discs becoming scratched and giving me problems. I just can't wait till all games and movies are downloaded or streamed... Much easier to store a digital library, especially when you can log back on and redownload it if something like a hard drive crash happened.

Once your disc gets scratched... It takes all kinds of effort and trouble and even money if you wanna go that route to get those DVD's fixed... It would also bring the prices down for movies if they didn't have to package them, but I'm not even a big movie guy anyways, that's why I'm fine streaming movies that have been out for a while.

I still use the big clunky 4:3 tvs lol... so no point in getting a blu-ray if i got that. HDTVs are still waaayyy to expensive for me to invest into with my tight budget. It'll more then likely be awhile till I even invest in an hdtv, let alone a blu-ray player.

I'm not going to pay 200 usd for a sylvannia blueray player, you gotta be kidding me.

Guest said:
BluRay has two insurmountable problems:
1) Embedded DRM (AACS, etc.) - that nobody with an IQ above 90 will touch (unless they are masochists)

Click to expand...

Seen the AVS thread about getting blu-ray to work on PowerDVD? It *is* voluntary torture. I can't believe the crap they have to go thru to get their own legit content to work!

India is a v big and sensitive market. Still players like sony try to sell their products at double the cost here. Bluray dvd players here sell anywhere btw 25,000 to 50,000 ( $500-1000$). Now who will go and buy blu-day player here when everyone knows it sells below $200 abroad? When you know everyday the technology changes who will risk of buying an expensive item and then it getting obsolete. We are not rich enuf to keep on buying and trying new and different things here. Pricing is the most major factor in driving sales. So if Sony keeps the price right they will notice double the sales of disc and players. One disc of blu-ray costs around 1500bucks i.e. $30 and it is just blank media. Movie disc wud cost more. Since there are not much titles in blu ray format who will risk of buying a media player and then face the consequence of upgrading it in the future.

My genuine advise to sony is to increase the production of blank blu-ray dics to 10times and bring the price to 1/10 th. Then the sales will speak for themself

today hd content is everywhere.. so i believe blu-ray has v bright future and they can take over the market. And if they believe they can be king by charging premium then they r wrong. No one is going to take a loan to buy those stupid gadgets just for ENTERTAINMENT purpose. I would rather buy blu-ray playable computer instead.

One other thing i saw when i bought my hdtv was that there are media players which you connect your hard drive to them and they can play all kinds of video formats.So instead of giving 200$ for a low quality br player you could give 80$.Of course this means that you have to have a blue ray player in your pc to copy the movies,if you want all of your movies to be legitimate.

I also agree with the other posters on this board about many of the problems of blue ray.
The discs are still quite expensive here in Canada $35-$55 depending on the movie.
The connection issue is still quite disturbing especially if you buy a new hi-def tv and it does not support your players particular type of cable. This could be a very expensive problem.
You just don't see this with the older tv and dvd systems that used either RCA, S-Video,or Component connections,they work good,have been around along time ,and so are familiar to most people. If you have an CRT set that you plan on using your not going to see a big defference.
Another point is that if you have a large dvd collection like some of my friends that are well over 1200 discs, you may not feel the urge to switch formats early especially if it is going to cost more for a movie and you may have payed a hefty price already for a high end dvd player. I still have my Sony DVD player I bought in 2000 for $700. I know other people with far more expensive units who don't intend on giving them up any time soon.
Something else to consider if you are a collector of movies and special features is that many of the blue-ray discs are being released with bare minimum extras as oposed to their
2 discs dvd cousins, which can have hours of extra content for less money. If you look around you can find many examples of this. I believe one such example is the 1982 version of the Thing,I think it only has the commentary track and one trivia feature. The special edition dvd has at least a 2 hour featurett. If you are a collector of movies this would deffinitely be something to consider.
If you have a high-end up-converting 1080p dvd player joined with a good Plasma , LCD, or LED display that can be properly adjusted, you may end up not seeing much of a difference in picture quality, especially with some of the older movies .
Also, who is to say another format could come along to challenge blue-ray in the next couple years that could be double it's quality.It sounds rediculous but it has happend before , and I find alot of people in this economic slump are worried about things like this and are not ready to shell out alot of money when there is this much uncertainty about the future.
Just something to ponder.

DVD is just good enough for a lot of us, and Blue-Ray movies new are too expensive, and I've often read reviews complaining about the picture quality on older movies. (not improved much and sometimes worse because of the higher resolutions)
You can't sell me on extras, never been worth added cost to me, ever.