For all of you people complaining about the price of Blu-ray, a moderatly newly available consumer technology...you all seem to forget...THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WITH NEW MEDIA FORMATS FFS. So perhaps a history lesson is in order just because i'm sick of the lack of perspective most seem to have on this topic.
First we have the format war between VHS and BETAMAX. Anyone remember betamax? It was out a year ahead of VHS and maintained a higher resolutions than VHS.Initially
betamax and VHS both only could do 330x480 (250 lines)
but they upped the ante in short order with Super Betamax moving up to 400x480 (300 lines)
Infact superBetaED that retailed in 1988 had a video resolution of 670x480 (500 lines) which is near the limit of standard def TV's still sold today (525 lines)
LaserDisc and VHS peaked at 560x480 (420 lines)
while analog TV brodcasts are only 440x480 (330 lines)
But sadly betawas more expensive and people prefered quantity over quality with the release of VHS's 4hour video cassettes
Same deal with the LaserDisc, came out in 77, and held steady with 560x480 throughout the 80's i believe, LD's also had the benifit of Uncompressed DTS audio (1536 kb/s) where DVD's still use the halfbit 768 kb/s DTS. Downside of LD's....they were huge, it was an aluminum record ffs and they held 30 minutes of video at thier start and worked their way up to 60 min's per 12in disc of shiny rainbows. (Laserdiscs were actually around until the mid 90's i remember my parents renting a LD player from this great independant video store to watch Abyss....why rent one? Because the players cost $600+ and the movies were $50 or so....They did have a great picture, and awesome sound quality, a huge range of titles, but still was a niche product for the most part (and was crushed with the introduction of DVDs in 1997.
After 20 years of collecting Movies on VHS, DVD's came about. They look just like CD's....same size as the CD's everyone had grown accustomed to during the previous 15 years...but it had a movie on it! I remember the first time i saw a DVD thinking "wow, laserdiscs shrunk" But hey, it's cool, same size as a CD, same shiny rainbowed layer on the bottom....maybe you can put it in the CDrom of a computer and watch it. oh wait no..it has a different colored
"LASER"
If you want to watch one of your favorite movies on the highquality DVD it will just cost you $30-$40 for the DVD...and $1000 or so for the device with the correct "LASER" that can translate what this piece of plastic coated metal is trying to show you.
The first Couple years of DVD's were pretty weak. The majority of stuff re-released on DVD came with subtitles....if that. You got to enjoy the privledge of buying something you already have..and the possibility of breaking the damn disc when trying to release the retention tabs in the box....or maybe scratching the shiny side so minutely that you aren't even sure if it's scratched until your movie freezes up 47 minutes in with no way to skip past it.
Couldn't record anything on a dvd, couldn't copy it,could inadvertantly change the region setting on a DVD drive to only read dics made in Serbia.....and nothing else ever ever again.
But then things started looking up in 1999 when DVD recorders came out. Anyone remember what those were like in the begining? The standalone recorders cost $3000-$4000. They recorded at 1x-2x...sometimes. Though the upside was DVD recorder drives for computers. My uncle worked in the TECH world so he was an early adopter of the drive, which cost a mere $1200 in 1998/99 for this cutting edge piece of hardware that burned blank DVD's at 1x speeds (which comes out to about 1.3 MB/s) meaning it took an hour to burn one disc. These discs in the begining cost $25-$30...each. In a generous estimate they only burned coasters about 50%, buthey, they're only $25 apeice or so, who cares!
Dual layer dvd-r's still cost $2 each if you happen to find them on sale, compared with the $9 sale price on a 50pk spool of memorex discs.
How about CD's? They came out in 82, in 85 CD players still could cost $800 or more, and when the recordable drives and media came out it was a similar situation to what would later happen with DVD's.
When HD-DVD and Blu-ray were both released, i was torn because i have spent countless hours burning hundreds upon thousands of DVD's over the years...so blu-ray was looking good with alll the chatter of 100 Gig double sided dual layer recordable discs, but i didn't want to have to migrate to another data medium or spend a bunch of money on a drive that would be obsolete in short order.
So after hearing all about how HD-DVD was going to be backwards compatible with existing DVD players..i was rooting for that. Triple the capacity of dual layer discs that work with the same drives annd players everyone already uses? Sounded to good to be true.
Big surprise...it was. What they meant was they would have one side of the disc in regular DVD format....and the other as HD-DVD. So still required purchasing another $700 or $800 player to watch something they could have fit on a double sided dual layer DVD format disc. HD-DVD sucked, it continues to suck, thats why it's dead, it was more encrypted then DVD 1.0.
Blu-ray has already worked up a 250gig disc that actually does work with the existing "Laser" in the movie players that are more expensive than anything....since the last format breakthrough.
As for how expensive Blu-ray players actually are now...they really aren't, i've seen several standalone players under $120, and many more in the $250 range. If you happen to be one of the many people who has a HTPC, the Blu-ray read only drives are under $100, the Burner's are around $300 or so last i saw. The blank media as someone already mentioned is around $5 a disc meaning that compared to DL-DVD+R's blu-ray costs about twice as much for 3-6 times the data capacity.