Cool Tech Reviews

Slow sales of Blu-ray players and movies will likely mean bargain pricing for the holiday shopping season:

“Blu-ray vendors and dealers are starting to realize that for Blu-ray to become the next DVD, they need to lower player prices in order to generate interest and build volumes,” said Steve Wilson, principal analyst at ABI, in a statement this week.

Wilson pointed out that tier-2 players and earlier models six to nine months old are already widely available for below $200, and that Amazon is selling a Samsung Blu-ray drive bundled with four disks in the same price range.
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As previously reported in BetaNews, unit sales for Blu-ray drives look likely to be lower than expected for 2008, too. Kurt Scherf, principal analyst at Parks Associates, told BetaNews in late October that total sales for the year will decline at least 25% from the firm’s original projections to about 2.2 million players in the US and 4.3 million worldwide.

Wilson is referring to an Amazon sale (scheduled to end on Nov. 11) offering $100 off on the purchase of a Blu-ray player and four Warner movies. The Samsung player referred to is likely the well-regarded Samsung BD-P1500 1080p Blu-ray Player which with four selections from the already discounted full list of Warner Blu-ray movies will easily come in under $200.

Suzanne Ault at Video Business reports that Warner Home Video is planning some aggressive price cutting on Blu-ray Discs during the fourth quarter:

Starting early September and rolling through first-quarter 2009, Warner will offer a Blu-ray point-of-sale rebate program with which retailers will essentially be able to order participating catalog titles for around $11.

Even with a retail mark-up on the featured titles—including The Fugitive, Enter the Dragon, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, The Aviator, Road Warrior and Swordfish—the price tag to consumers should be significantly less than the titles’ current average of $20 to $25 retail price at outlets such as Amazon.com and Best Buy.
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Additionally, Warner will offer rebates, although less extensive, for newer Blu-ray releases, including 300, The Departed, I Am Legend, Ocean’s 13 and We Are Marshall. This layer of the Blu-ray program also will run from early September to the first quarter, according to store sources.

The consumer price for these titles is likely to fall somewhere between $17 and $20. That would still represent a deal for shoppers, as titles such as 300 are now falling between $24 and $30 at outlets such as Amazon and Best Buy.

After Blu-ray won the high def DVD war, it has been plagued by the perception that both the players and the titles are priced exorbitantly. This ought to help a little although click through to see the complaints from retailers who think it might be a bad idea because "format is becoming devalued too quickly."

If you have a Blu-ray DVD player and want to pick up some films at a bargain price, check out Amazon’s summer 50% off sale on what appears to be 116 different movies.

I see that I haven’t mentioned solid state drives in nearly two years, but it is one area where technical advances are coming hot and heavy as indicated by yesterday’s announcement by Samsung of a 256GB SSD which could be shipping in products by the end of 2008:

Samsung late on Sunday promised what it says is a breakthrough in solid-state drives with the launch of its first 256GB SSD. The drive offers twice the capacity of the Korean firm’s previous 128GB SSD but is also much faster. The 256GB edition reads sequential data at 200MB per second, twice the rate of the original model, while also seeing an even greater increase in write speeds: where the earlier drive writes at 70MB per second, the new SSD writes at 160MB per second.

The big question of course is the cost and while Samsung isn’t quoting prices yet, there is some good news:

Rather than use costly single-level cell (SLC) technology, the company has managed to develop a multi-level cell (MLC) storage drive that transfers as quickly as the best SLC storage while costing much less to produce than past SSDs. Improvements to the storage controller have also extended the longevity to as long as SLC drives, giving the 256GB drive longevity as good or better than some rotating hard disks.

SLC and MLC refer to how much information can be stored in one flash memory cell. A multi-level cell stores more than the single bit in a single-level cell providing a greater areal density and lower cost per bit.

Samsung expects its new drive to be sampling for computer manufacturers by September and shipping to those clients by the end of the year; this applies to both a 2.5-inch drive for more traditional notebooks and a 1.8-inch drive for ultraportables and other much smaller devices.

No customers have been announced, but it will be interesting to see who jumps on board and how inexpensive these beauties really are.

Sony’s Blu-ray won the high definition DVD format fight when Toshiba threw in the towel today on its HD DVD format:

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.
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“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation.
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Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.

Longtime Toshiba ally Universal Studios also announced that they would become exclusively Blu-ray and you can expect everyone else to follow suit except for a few exceptions like LG Electronics who said that they will continue to ship dual format players for a while.

There’s yet another nail in the coffin of HD DVD as Netflix announced that in the future they would only stock Blu-ray high definition DVDs:

In what can only be classified as yet another crushing blow to the embattled HD DVD camp, rent-by-mail giant Netflix has just announced its intention to only stock Blu-ray titles in the future. Netflix justified its decision by pointing out the fact that most Hollywood studios seem to be converging solely around the Sony-backed format — a fact that’s all too familiar to Toshiba and friends. With both Blockbuster and now the ‘Flix having eschewed HD DVD for BD, it’s gonna get harder and harder to even find a place to rent those former discs in the first place, let alone one that has a decent selection.

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