Will You Be Buying A Blu-ray Player This Year?

[MOVIEGEEK]

With the price of players dropping and most players now have BD Live,will you be buying a Blu-ray player this year?

[ricardouk]

No, its not just the player, HD TVs are expensive aswell, I have a few hundred dvds and i dont see the need (yet) to upgrade the player and tv, discs are still expensive (at least here), HD digital broadcastig (terrestrial/satelitte) just started here.

Is BD LIVE a killer feature?

BD-Live is a newly developed Blu-ray feature that enables you to access content via your internet-connected Blu-ray player. BD-Live can allow you to download a variety of up-to-date content (e.g., refreshed previews and exclusive special features), and can also enable an exciting state of the next generation possibilities, such as ringtone/wallpaper downloads, peer to peer interactions, live events and gaming activities.

special features? put them on the disc! State of the next generation possibilities, such as rigtones, wallpapers.... lol lol lol

[vatkat234]

If you have a HDTV set and like movies you need Blu-Ray. The players will drop over time and even people that do not want Blu-Ray will but when they hit 100 dollars.

[fritzi93]

Yeah, probably next Christmas.

The Lord of the Rings is supposed to be out on BD by then. But I'm also waiting for cheaper/better players.

[gadgetguy]

The HDTVs are still out of my price range so Blu-ray is moot.

[greymalkin]

yep..too expensive...if I want HD goodness I'll get HD DVD's for pennies on the blu-ray version. the new movies that are good will be just as good a year from now.

[freebird73717]

No. Can't afford HDTV right now so no need for a Blueray player.

[Constant Gardener]

No - we already have a PS3 in the house, and one Blu-Ray video, "Planet Earth".

[yoda313]

I voted "already own one" but technically I have two. MY first was a bd rom player for the pc that I still have. I then bought a ps3 last year.

I have only 4 movies right now in Bluray. I'll slowly increase my collection overtime. I think maybe I'll try ebay again - I looked and they had some good prices for hd-dvd (I still have my xbox 360 hddvd drive and its in working order).

[MOVIEGEEK]

I voted "already own one" but technically I have two. MY first was a bd rom player for the pc that I still have. I then bought a ps3 last year.

I have only 4 movies right now in Bluray. I'll slowly increase my collection overtime. I think maybe I'll try ebay again - I looked and they had some good prices for hd-dvd (I still have my xbox 360 hddvd drive and its in working order).

Yeah I have alot more HD DVD than Blu-ray,32 vs 2.I picked up most of them for ~$8 a piece on sale at Frys,when my HD DVD player breaks I will sell my collection.People still trade LD even though that's a dead format.

[SmokieStover]

I voted no, I will never buy one, because it was the closest to the truth.

Truth is that I do not have a hi-def TV and have no interest in buying one. There's damn little new on DVD that I care for and the same is true for TV. Video quality is not that important to me. If the story is good and I can understand what is being said, VHS EP gets the job done.

NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE VIDEO IS, if I have to strain to understand what is being said because the audio is so poor and the closed captions are 3 or more lines behind the dialogue, I just can not watch very much of it. Such is my experience with the only network shows that I watch.......two CBS shows produced in hi-def with 5.1 audio. Off antenna with a DTV converter box or off cable with a Philips 3576H, the audio on The Mentalist and Without a Trace have been absolutely horrible these last 4 months .....way to low in volume and off tone and unintelligable way too often. Friends who have HDTVs experience the same thing.

If I need a HDTV, Blu-ray player and disk, and a 5.1 sound system to watch a TV show or movie, I will just pull the plug.

[Epicurus8a]

My six year old DVD player just died, so I just ordered a Samsung BDP-1500 It's not the best machine, but the price was right.

[Dark Mirage]

I have a 26" 720p LCD tv, purchased last November. It's nice. I'm having fun with it, including making home-made antennas for OTA reception.

This is about as large a tv screen as I want. I like to keep tv 'in its place', not dominating a room. :P These entertainment centers in homes set up for people to stare at a nearly wall-size screen are not my idea of sentient life.

My DVDs look fine on it. I'm not about to replace them. Heck, I even have a large collection of Asian VCDs (mostly high quality IVL releases of Shaw Brothers movies).

It's entertainment. I will still be a good person if I go to my grave without ever having owned a Blue-Ray player.

[gll99]

Only if I buy an HDtv first and then it will likely be a ps3 and/or a computer BR reader and/or writer. They keep changing the prices on the HDtv models that I'm looking at. By the time I confirm the specs, study the reviews etc... and make up my mind the price has gone up.

[Midzuki]

Everything regarding Hi-Def TV still is too expensive in the "3rd World"(read: Brazil).
One of my nieces already has a 52-inch TV-set, a Blu-Ray player and
a couple of BD titles. But I am not impressed with the average visual quality of
the broadcast signals (frequently not much better than a "KDVD" to my eyes).

///

[laszlo12]

You could order much cheaper bluray frou US. Well depends on curreency rates

[redwudz]

I have two BD ROM players, a LG and a Sony. I don't need a settop BD player.

[DereX888]

IF Sony dies and BD becomes property of any other corporation...

[oldfart13]

Foreget the players...where is my Blu Ray Recorder?

[robjv1]

No for me. It's just not enough of a leap in quality in most cases. This is especially true in my case, as I would much rather watch talking heads then action movies. I have no real need for 7.1 channel audio with the material I watch. My brother thinks I'm crazy. It seems like everytime I go over there to see him, he's gotta show me his lastest car-chase-explosion-gun-shooting movie and he always marvels at the directional audio (don't you feel like you actually getting shot at!?). In most cases I find it to detract from the movie watching expreience as it's usually used as an in-your-face, look what I can do gimmick that I find distracting instead of immersive.

Plus going from VHS -> DVD when paired with a widescreen TV you got non letterboxed 16:9, no video quality hassles like tracking issues or dropouts, goodbye to having to rewind tapes.

A BR recorder is appealing to me, but I would really only be into it if I could use it to make my VHS->DVD conversions as I do now, but on a much higher capacity disc. For television shows from anything earlier then 2000, putting the same # of movies on a BD disc as you would on a DVD disc and selling it for more money just seems like a big waste of potential to me. For the love of god though, I hope that if they make a BR recorder, that they make one that will hold up to a lot of usage, as DVD recorders have left most of us wanting in that regard.

I do have HDTV cable feeds that I watch and they do look great, but is it THAT much better then a widescreen DVD? Not really, no.

Although personally I don't like the idea of an end to optical media. I hope DVD can hang in there for a few more years and hopefully something better will come along to replace it.

[budz]

I voted "already own one". I have only 2 blu-ray movies and I rent from Netflix. I bought my Panasonic BD-35 player last Christmas for a reasonable price of $240.34 which included free shipping via Best Buy.
Picture quality is stunning on my Sony 40 inch LCD TV.

[usually_quiet]

I voted "No, The prices are still too high", but there's more to it than that. Like several others responding to this poll, I only have SD TVs. Even if I bought an HDTV, at present I have nothing to watch but DVDs. That's all I am able to rent convenently, and at a reasonable cost, for the purpose of watching one or two movies per month. Until those things are not an issue anymore, I don't have any use for a Blu-Ray player.

[MJA]

I also I voted "No, The prices are still too high"

player/burner+media(more important) is too high

[cal_tony]

my vote... I already have one.

Bought my PS3 close to 9mo ago. Like others,, I just rent Bluray movies.
As time goes by, I find myself renting DVD's instead of Blurays when both are available.
The video quality for most movies just doesn't warrant all that Bluray hoopla.
Most movies just don't make the most of the DVD standard let alone the expanded bluray standard.

Tony

[DereX888]

A BR recorder is appealing to me, but I would really only be into it if I could use it to make my VHS->DVD conversions as I do now, but on a much higher capacity disc.

I would expand it:
if we could use Blu discs like standard DVD-Video discs (in other words: "DVD-Video on BR") and the players would play them as such, most of us certainly would be interested.
I remember the talk about entire tv series or seasons on just 1 disc...

Like LD and MD (other fine Sony products) Blu is just ahead of time (same as HD-DVD was).
5-10 more years later when at least all of civilized world switches entirely to HD TV it will make significant sales progress, but currently when 1/4 of USA is buying HD->SD converters (geez...) and most of the world is stuck in SD only, BR is actually exactly in the same market spot where LD was for movies and MD for portable digital music in the 90s.

If it weren't for PS3 I'm sure BR would have long died by now.



@yoda
How about making next poll about HD->SD coverters?
I don't know about you, but I am curious how many (american ofcoz) VH members bought them

[Number Six]

I have several DVD Players, Recorders, and Burners, plus a large collection of movies and TV series on DVD - I also do not own a HD TV set, nor do I plan to buy 1 until the price of a quality 37" 1080p unit drops below $400. I have no plans to buy a Blu-Ray player, but I would rather buy a Blu-Ray recorder at approximately the $100 level - this is not going to happen anytime soon. I have no need or desire to upgrade to any new technology until it becomes absolutely necessary - but, I would love an OLED screen - also not going to happen anytime soon.

[Chopmeister]

No - but not because of price. I will buy one when I can find a Zone A player (or multizoned one) locally that works with local voltage (230V 50Hz) here. The Zone B (where I am stuck) release window is terrible, prices are sky high, and the range available is very limited. I will buy when I can purchase discs from US Amazon etc with confidence that they will work. Until then, upscaled DVD does me just fine. I know it's not as good as Blueray, but on my 40" screen fed from a relatively top-line upscaling player it is pretty darn good.

Even then I may chose to wait a bit. What I really want is a recorder. I record a lot of DVDs off cable (legally). I will upgrade my cable package to hidef (it costs extra here) when I can archive to Bluray - which I can't do at the moment as I need an HDCP stripper (which I think remains legal for personal use in this country), Bluray recorders aren't yet readily available, and the cost of Bluray media remains prohibitive here. When all of these are solved, I will be in!

[yoda313]

@chopmeister - an alternative would be the hauppauge hd pvr. It records high def via component rather than hdmi. It is also supposed to record 5.1 via fiber optic after a firmware upgrade. Then you could do that pretty easily assuming your cable box has component output which I'm sure it would.

[Dv8ted2]

I land in the no, too expensive category. I would have to replace my televisions and I am not willing to do that.

[handyguy]

No, Netflix says only 1% of rentals are BR.

I saw some on the net, sure the sharpness is nice but one gets used to it.