Toshiba Permanently Drops HD DVD Player Prices

[Boz]

Hot on the heels of a month-long promotional price cut, Toshiba announced on Thursday that it would permanently lower prices on two of its entry level HD DVD players.

Effective July 1, Toshiba says its HD-A2 player will be permanently offered at an MSRP $299, while its HD-A20 will be offered at $399.

This returns prices on both players to the same levels seen earlier this month as part of the company's month-long $100 rebate offer. As we've previously reported, Toshiba had reported stronger than expected results from the recent promo, with some retailers claiming a five- to ten-fold increase in sales.

SOURCE: Hi-Def Digest

[Venomous]

Blu-Ray beating them down

[DoubleThink]

Good, this will hopefully make the Blu-ray drive I want go cheaper. (Y)

[rajputwarrior]

screw blu-ray.. go HD!!!

[L3thal Veteran]

This is all good and dandy, but they should consider lowering prices for the movies, not the players. $35 for a movie in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is a little on the high end. They should should start a transition of lowering DVD prices to around $15 for new releases and Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to around $25 so it gives people incentives to buy the more expensive version.

Hell, I bought Planet Earth in Blu-Ray because it was only $13 more than the DVD version. If it was anything over $20, I would've done otherwise.

[Rahul]

screw blu-ray.. go HD!!!

Amen

[DELTETHISACCOUNT]

I want to buy a Blu-Ray player and put it next to my 360. Not only to be ironic, but all of the good movies are out on Blu-Ray, HD has the crappiest movies...

[Boz]

I want to buy a Blu-Ray player and put it next to my 360. Not only to be ironic, but all of the good movies are out on Blu-Ray, HD has the crappiest movies...

What a laughable comment, but again, you are probably 16 year old kid and find Underworld II a super hot movie worth having in your hi-def archives. Pft, kids.

[Sheppard]

Blu-Ray beating them down

Hardly, its more like a move to counter Blu-Rays "incentive" to get 5 free films with a player. Talk about underhand tactics just to try and force Blu-Ray into the lead. If Toshiba couldnt comfortably afford it then there would be no price drop.

[bucko]

This is one of the best things about "waiting", the price keeps tumbling down. I hope the HD-DVD group lower the price of the X360 HD-DVD player officeally then it will become cheaper than the PS3 Blu-Ray player by far (all put together I mean).

[Sheppard]

I dont think the HD DVD group have anything to do with the Microsoft player, its up to Microsoft to drop the price of that.

[Express]

The prices will drop when they have dedicated chips for HDDVD players. Right now they are shipping with computer parts like Intel processor, x86 bus etc!

[DELTETHISACCOUNT]

What a laughable comment, but again, you are probably 16 year old kid and find Underworld II a super hot movie worth having in your hi-def archives. Pft, kids.

Theres no need to be so defensive... so unnecessary. Next time, instead of guessing, just look at my profile and you'll find that I'm actually 18. I don't really care if you consider to me to be a kid, if I saw your age, I would probably consider you an old man.

I work at Circuit City and I'm always keeping up with new releases and what customers are buying. Blu-Ray is selling like crazy, all of the hottest movies are coming out on it. HD-DVD has a bunch of old movies upscaled, nobody wants it.

So stop assuming that I'm taking sides just because I want to. Do some research OUTSIDE the internet for once.

[Boz]

Theres no need to be so defensive... so unnecessary. Next time, instead of guessing, just look at my profile and you'll find that I'm actually 18. I don't really care if you consider to me to be a kid, if I saw your age, I would probably consider you an old man.

I work at Circuit City and I'm always keeping up with new releases and what customers are buying. Blu-Ray is selling like crazy, all of the hottest movies are coming out on it. HD-DVD has a bunch of old movies upscaled, nobody wants it.

So stop assuming that I'm taking sides just because I want to. Do some research OUTSIDE the internet for once.

Let me just start off with a response that I'm not defensive at all (no reason to be, I'm not even sure what you meant by that, cause actually you are the one who is defensive), and just want to say that you are a very young kid that cheers for things they don't understand. Working at Circuit City or not, it is really not a positive thing to see that you might be giving advice to anyone abou their purchases.This is why Circuit City lags behind other electronics chains and I don't even consider it a quality electronics store to begin with.

HD-DVD movies are not UPSCALED movies. Almost all HD-DVD are REAL HI-def titles with an incredible quality. If anything Blu-Ray titles are upscaled ones. You want to argue that, go pick up Pirates of the Carribean and watch it, you'll see so much noise in the movies that it's a disgrace to call this Hi-def.

For Christ sake, movies on TNT and HBO HD look 10 times better then these Blu-Ray titles and yeah, take a peak at my profile and blog, you'll see that I have both. So much for better quality comment out your ass.

I'm not sure what you are talking about, but here are some of the titles you will NOT see on Blu-Ray:

Cinderella Man

Pitch Black

The Chronicles of Riddick

Assault on Precinct 13

U-571

Happy Gilmore

Ray

Spy Game

The Bone Collector

Land of the Dead

The Fast and the Furious trilogy

Army of Darkness

King Kong

The Mummy

The Mummy Returns

The Good Shepherd

Children of Men

The Game

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Bruce Almighty

Liar, Liar

The Bourne Identity

The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Ultimatum (when it comes out)

Hot Fuzz

Shaun of the Dead

Heroes series

Battlestar Galactica series

Inside Man

The Last Starfighter (original!)

Meet the Parents

Meet The Fockers

Scarface

Se7en

--

Right now, The Ultimate Matrix Collection is also not on Blu-Ray

and all Warner, Paramount, NewLine, Dreamworks, HBO, HDNet, Discovery Channel, BBC, Magnolia, DVD International, Weinstein Company titles are available on HD-DVD. With Warner and Paramount releasing on Blu-Ray but Warner actually leans more towards HD-DVD if you can live with that.

So yeah, I'm not lacking movies and I have 6 Blu-Ray movies that are really worth something and 32 HD-DVD movies, all awesome.

[DELTETHISACCOUNT]

So by attacking my comment, you weren't being defensive about HD in any way? Yeah, sure.

Just for the record, we at Circuit City DO NOT take sides when it comes to HD or BR. We give the customers straight up facts when it comes to TV's, computers, or anything else just like any other electronics store would. It doesn't matter if we lag behind in sales, we work hard and offer the same quality service as any other store like Best Buy or Fry's would. So to say that we're not a quality electonics store is complete idiocy.

That list of movies is so pointless too. I could counter back with a huge list of movies that will never see the light of HD, but whats the use? It doesn't change the fact that some movies will only be on BR, and some will be on HD. My personal favorites are on BR and that's the main reason why I want a BR player, not because of grain or quality.

And I find it amusing that you're attacking a movie that was made back in 2003, when HD was the last thing anyone thought about. I've seen Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, made just last year and there was barely any grain, absolutely stunning picture. And if you want to talk about a movie that was made around the same time, lets talk Miami Vice. My goodness, there was so much grain in it, I could make a sandcastle out of it.

Yeah, and it's great to see that you own so much crap. Kudos to you, not all of us can just throw out all of our money on things like you can. This argument is more pointless than 360 vs PS3 argument, you won't see me in this thread again.

[Ayepecks]

Ruiz, I see your point, but you said "HD has the crappiest movies." He refuted you by giving you a list of good movies... isn't that what you were saying it lacked to begin with? Some of your information is just downright wrong. You said HD DVD offered upscaled movies in the beginning, when I think that exact same argument has been lodged against Blu Ray a bit more frequently.

Both have some good exclusive movies, I think. I prefer HD DVD myself, but I don't care either way which format wins.

[JohnBfromMemphis]

History is against Sony/Bluray and we all know it Bluray is still prohibitively (sp?) expensive (both players and movies) and hd dvd player costs are steadily dropping so I think that hd dvd is eventually going to come out on top. I'm not going to say that Sony is getting desparate, why should they be giving away 5 movies with every player.

[Ficman]

@ 299.00 a pop I maybe swayed to buy one... :yes:

[+vlsi0n Subscriber¹]

When the times comes I'll upgrade, I'm just hopinh it'll be to HD-DVD. But in the end, it doesn't matter much as long as it's high quality, and low(est)(as possible) cost.

[Boz]

After everything, I wouldn't even have a problem if Blu-Ray won, but here without any cheering, I will give you some facts. On Pioneer Elite 50" Plasma, PS3 and X360 HD-DVD are connected. I have around 8 or 10 blu-ray movies now and I think around 35-40 HD-DVD movies, almost EVERY blu-ray movie has incredible amount of grain. It's very dissapointing. It doesn't look hi-def at all on some titles. Maybe I just picked the titles that are old, but the fact still remains that I did the same thing with HD-DVD movies and the story completely opposite, I have maybe 1 or 2 movies that are grainy (like Dune and maybe 1 or 2 more movies that are really old). Blu-Ray titles I'm talking about are Casino Royale (has grain, not as much as others but still noticable), Pirate of the Carribean Black Perl (damn this one looks aweful, so much grain), SWAT is not THAT bad, but still, grain. I swear it's really annoying. The only really STUNNING title is Ice Age 2: Meltdown. God this animated movie looks SICK on Blu-Ray. I have Happy Feet on HD-DVD that's also fully computerized and it can't even come close to Ice Age's razor sharp details.

I'm not saying they are not capable of producing really clean pictures but wtf? This is really the reason why I stopped buying Blu-Ray movies, the quality SUCKS. Maybe newer releases improve, but hey Casino Royale was fairly new and it still has grain. I don't know, maybe I"m too picky, but HD-DVD titles just look better. I don't know what they do and how they encode or whatever but it is what it is.