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Five reasons not to buy a Blu-ray player yet

By John P. Falcone, CNET.com
Feb 08, 2008

3. There are still very few movies available on Blu-ray: As of February 5, 2008, there are less than 450 current Blu-ray titles available in the US (not counting discontinued and adult titles). That stacks up well to HD-DVD (around 400). But it's a drop in the bucket compared to standard DVD, which has at least 90,000 titles available (including TV shows).

Caveat: Sure, it's small now, but the number of Blu-ray titles is growing slowly but surely. In fact, Blu-ray and HD-DVD adoption (combined) has actually outpaced that of the original DVD format, which took three or four years before it really went mainstream.


450 Blu-ray vs. 90,000 DVD titles.
4. Blu-ray still has growing pains: How many times have you popped a brand new DVD into your player, only to be greeted with a message that you need to update the firmware to view the movie? Probably never, but Blu-ray early adopters have faced this message more than they would like to admit. (To be fair, HD-DVD has had its share of disc compatibility issues as well.) To make matters worse, many early Blu-ray players can't update via Ethernet, so you'll need to burn a CD to update the player. If you're reading Crave, burning a disc probably isn't a problem--but there are many less-tech-savvy people that love DVDs, but have no idea what an ISO file is.

5. Prices have nowhere to go but down: Even without competition from HD-DVD, Blu-ray prices seem to be on a one-way ticket downward, so don't be surprised to see in-house specials at S$599 or lower. In fact, the Samsung BD-P1400 is now going for only S$99 with each 40-inch full-HD LCD TV purchased at Harvey Norman in Singapore.

Caveat: See item number 1: The cheaper players are likely to be older models that are effectively "obsolete".

So there you have it: There's absolutely no compelling reason to dive into Blu-ray, at least for the next few months. But as with all of the items above, the conclusion comes with a big caveat of its own: The Sony PlayStation 3. It's the only player that's future-proof, it doubles as a top-notch game machine and network digital media streamer, and it's readily available for S$559. Oh--it also happens to be a great Blu-ray player, and it does a fine job of upconverting your standard DVDs to high-definition resolutions. As such, it remains the exception to the rule, and the only Blu-ray player that we can enthusiastically recommend for the time being.

  • 2. There are still very few movies available on Blu-ray


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