| Editorial December 2009
Will It Be a Blu-ray Holiday?
 We haven’t visited the
Blu-ray format on the editorial page in a while, so perhaps it’s time to take a look
at what’s happening. By all rights this should be the holiday when Blu-ray comes into
its own. Decent players are already priced at just over a hundred dollars, and many are
predicting that they’ll dip below that on Black Friday and in the two or three
weeks leading up to Christmas. There’s a fairly large Blu-ray catalog now, and any
titles released more than six months ago are attractively priced. Some retailers have
also realized that it can be profitable to sell new releases at lower prices. At my local
Walmart I recently saw Near Dark, just released by Lions Gate,
on Blu-ray for a mere ten bucks.
Both Best Buy and Walmart have courted the studios for low
prices on upcoming hits such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince. Add to this the bargains you can find online with previously owned Blu-ray
Discs and it becomes apparent that if you purchase a Blu-ray player this holiday, you
won’t have to rob a bank or refinance your home to acquire some decent titles for it.
To make things even better, stores are pricing large monitors at half of last year’s
cost, sometimes even lower. So if you want to go Blu-ray but need an HD monitor to
complete the deal, now’s the perfect time.
Yes, this really could be the Blu-ray holiday, which means
there’ll be much deliberation over which player to purchase. And one factor worth
considering is the design of the players themselves. Almost all are Profile 2.0 now, which
means they can connect to the Internet, but many, such as Samsung’s players, are
configured to connect to Netflix and other sites for downloading movies and music. And
with downloads on the rise, discs, which have to be manufactured, shipped, inventoried,
and displayed, may no longer be worth the effort.
USB ports and SD card slots are now practically essential
for a Blu-ray player. I wouldn’t suggest buying one that doesn’t have one of
those, as well as an Ethernet connection so you can connect to the Internet and be ready
when things change. Both rentals and purchases will be affected. Best Buy is now
experimenting with digital kiosks where you can download standard-definition (DVD quality)
titles using your own SD card. There’s nothing to return, and as it currently stands
you have 30 days to use the card you made. Once you use it, you have 48 hours of viewing
before DRM kicks in. The initial plan is to have a selection of over one
thousand titles.
SD cards might be a possibility for sales as well, and
downloads could still occur in other ways. But a change is definitely coming. And though
SD is fine for the moment, people are frantically working to find new ways to download HD
successfully. My feeling is that a workable system should allow you to download a file to
keep on either your computer or to burn on a disc. Streaming downloads, much like
broadcasts, are subject to too many glitches.
What you buy this holiday will depend on what kind of
viewer you are. If you’re a collector and you love having shelves filled with your
favorite titles, then a really good Blu-ray player makes sense. If you rent and forget,
then a Blu-ray player with download options is a good ploy. If you choose the former, you
can always watch your high-quality Blu-ray Discs on your player for as long as it’s
ticking (which, with today’s build qualities, ought to be a while) because it’s
unlikely that the download folks will come up with anything better than Blu-ray this
season. Any HD monitor will work with any of the delivery formats, but you might want to
check out the inputs offered, and you might ask about 3D-ready features. More than ever,
the devil is in the details.
This season will be both interesting and, thanks to our
shifting economy, unpredictable. Blu-ray is king of the HD world right now, and it
probably will be for a little longer. But my bet is
that though Blu-ray will have its day (and its season this year), its
days are numbered.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com |
