Wal-Mart Offers Blue-Ray Players At $298
DVD is slowly starting to give up its position in the audio-visual market to Blu-ray, and at some point Blu ray and DVD will be relegated to the past as were the CDs which preceded them. Although there is also HD DVD, in the battle between Blu ray vs HD DVD, it can’t compete with Blu-ray.
A dual-layer Blu ray disc can store up to 50GB of data which is almost six times the capacity of a dual-layer DVD. Such a huge capacity allows for the storage of very high-quality movies, and currently there are around 1,000 titles available on Blu-ray. The trouble is that the price for Blue-ray players has been prohibitive for many consumers.
A Sony or Panasonic player, for example, will cost around $400, but that might all change as TVPredictions reports.
According to the web site, Blu-ray.com, $298 Blu-ray players are showing up on shelves of certain Wal-Mart stores under brand names such as Magnavox and Sylvania.
However, the players apparently are coming from manufacturer Funai, which has been rumored for months to be working on a low-cost Blu-ray player.
It’s obvious that you can’t expect the same quality as a Sony product from the likes of Funai, but on the other hand it’s possible that Funai’s strategy will force other manufacturers to reduce their prices in order to compete. This should certainly popularize the format, and even classic films are starting to appear on Blue ray.
High-Def Digest reports the first list of movies.
‘The Third Man,’ ‘Bottle Rocket,’ ‘Chungking Express,’ ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ ‘El Norte,’ ‘The 400 Blows,’ ‘Gimme Shelter,’ ‘The Complete Monterey Pop,’ ‘Contempt,’ ‘Walkabout,’ ‘For All Mankind,’ ‘The Wages of Fear,’ and both stand-alone and deluxe box set editions of ‘The Last Emperor.’
Photo: © htella
