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Five reasons not to buy a Blu-ray player yet



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 (US$441.02) or lower. In fact, the Samsung BD-P1400 is now going for only S$99 (US$72.89) 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 (US$411.57). 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.

 

 
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haewanko says...
I have one great reason "Why not to buy an HD-DVD EVER" Toshiba is pulling the plug on it. They will stop making it because of poor sales so it is very silly to put up this article discouraging us to buy Blu-ray when HD-DVD should be avoided.

Feb 19, 2008 10:57
 
 
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