News Sony goofs by showing declining Blu-ray sales

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/09/07/sony_goofs_by_showing_declinging_blu-ray_sales/1

At CEDIA 2007, Sony meant to show that Blu-ray disc sales have been double that of HD DVD. Instead, it has shown that sales of both formats have been on the decline.

 

atleast they don't lie about it

the problem is people are most likely scared to dump that much money into the technology and especially with movies being exclusive meaning your pretty much bound to get both or stick with dvd.

 

i like the look of blu-ray but still holding out for multi format players and cheaper prices

 

there are a bunch of hd-dvd titles that are hd-dvd and dvd complaint... my parents watched smoking aces on their dvd player the day after i watched it in hd... so i would think early adopters would go the hd route for that feature specifically. i own a ps3 and an hd-dvd player so it matters not to me, but atleast give the little credit where it is due to hd. even if they don't buy an hd-player they could get the hd-version then upgrade later since the format might die but the players will drop in price and they will eventually be able to play the high def version anyways...

 

Actually, I think it's more likely that people are sitting back and waiting for the HD players to get cheaper. Everyone knows that in another year HD multimedia will be as cheap as standard is today.

 

It makes sense. Most people are not willing to go after something that isn't set in stone. I still think the DVD/HD-DVD thing is kind of idk....impractical, but I guess if it's worth it to people to pay more for a movie now that will allow for HD in the near future then that's their call...I would rather just stick with regular DVD's for now and try to upscale them to 1080i and THEN when a format is declared a winner, that's when I'd get a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player.....but that's just me like I said, not a generalization of what consumers will probably do.....but I think it's the best decision as right now....for the price atleast...

 

I'm throwing in my own format.

Awesome-Disc.

 

I wonder if they tried to put DVD's on that graph too ?

Of course if they had tried it would have been off the scale

 

I dont really see what is causing such high retail prices for the blu-ray tech, I cant see them costing that much to produce, if they lowered the price they would sell more thus make more, but again I dont know how much it cost to make one so I cant say that the prices are over inflated but given Sony history most of the time they charge 3 times what the item normally is worth minus the PS3 as they are losing money on each system they sell lol.

 

that is what I'm doing

 

The other reason that they're not taking off is that for most people DVD is more than enough. There's no real benefit to HD for a lot of people. DVD offered a huge leap from VHS, Chapters, no-rewinding, extra content, 5.1 audio and smooth playback controls on a format that doesn't degrade with use. Over DVD, HD offers....

• more dots with more colour - The number of people I've seen at the local tv shop stare in awe ooo-ing and aah-ing at the HD tvs is great except they're playing a regular DVD
• lossless audio - come on most people couldn't care less or wouldn't even notice
• more speakers - like 5.1 wasn't hard enough to arrange in a typical tv room and again a lot of people wouldn't care or notice

So the entire market consists of enthusiasts, the rich, the must have the latest stuff croud, those who buy whatever the adverts tell them to and that rarest of the rare, people who backup!

Free (almost) always wins and while not upgrading from DVD is free then I reckon that DVD will be good enough for most people

 

And therein lies the problem, in my opinion. On a decent HD television, with a proper HD source, the picture quality can be stunning. However, as you pointed out, the majority of the consumer market doesn't know anything about HD. They think they know, but they don't.

I blame part of that on the technical aspects of HD. The two competing formats aren't confusing enough, but then you add the LCD/Plasma war and the 720p/1080i/1080p war and pretty soon consumers are left scratching their heads. When they get confused, they just go to Wal-Mart and buy a DVD player.

-monkey

 

I'm planning on getting a HD player as soon as they're a little cheaper. Whether Blu Ray or HD wins the war doesnt really matter that much to me. I've been very impressed by the upconverting feature on a couple of players. The quality you can get from upconverting a dvd seems pretty good from what i've seen. Upconvert capable HD players are mostly much cheaper than upconvert Blu Ray players.
One of these players will not only allow me to watch my current dvd collection in good quality on my hdtv but if a movie i want is blu-ray only (like the pirates of the carribean movies which are disney) then i'll just by the dvd (and the price of standard dvds will continue to fall) and then upconvert. With HD discs being much cheaper to produce I think the chances of HD winning a price war are very good. Maybe one day I wont be able to buy a standard dvd in the shops anymore but by that time I'm sure either one format will have won or most players will be dual-format.

 

I hope that blu-ray wins this war just because they have higher data capacity. Problem is that the players are more expensive, and most people go for the cheapest thing (HD-DVD).

So I'm basically just waiting for the blu-ray lair to do a huge mistake. We all know it will happen, and when it does I'll buy a HD-DVD player.

(Yay for positive thinking...)

oh, and I'll probably wait for someone to make a player that doesn't look like utter crap! At least something that have a standard width, so it will fit into my stereo-"rack".

 

people will probably upgrade to HD as they have to

If my TV died ATM, id probably upgrade to HD (if the price is right) but currently, there is no need to upgrade, we've only got 1 LCD tv in our house, and the others are CRT - why? because there's no need to replace the CRT's

 

Do they include PS3 games in that graph?

 

Both are greate! But...

As they announced the HD-DVD gives you nearly the same quality as Blu-DVD while maintaining a relative low price.
Price! You know, price is a sensitive topic to those people reside in developing countries and these countries hold a large market.
These people with a average income may just pay half-day or even one-day work for a blank blu-ray disk.
You can imagine how a blu-dvd containing the latest Hollywood's film being sold there.
I think they would not hesitate to support HD-DVD(if they choose to upgrade).

 

The higher capacity of Blu-ray is a moot point - firstly, there's little around that needs that capacity, although I suppose having an entire TV series on one disk would be cool, but secondly the formats are very similar, as I believe they both use the same type of laser and both use MPEG4 / VC1 encoding. It just needs a chip that can decode both formats (which Broadcom already have on the market). So maybe it would be over simplifying things to suggest that if one player can play BR and HDDVD with little in the way of additional hardware, then when the first incarnation of HD-DVD starts looking a little cramped, v2 of the standard could easily increase capacity while still providing backward compatibility for v1 and older players might just need a firmware upgrade to make use of the extra space. Who knows and right now, who cares. I'm still happy with DVD and besides I can't afford a projector that can do 1080p native, so what would I do with a player that has to output that just to justify its huge capacity?

 

Maybe capacity isn't much of an issue now, but give it a few years and you'll see.

Just look at a DVD today. 4,7GB isn't much. (which is the only real option, as dual layer disks are overly expensive)