Why buy Sony’s new $599 Blu-ray player when a PS3 costs the same ?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 27 February 2007 20:30

Your IT - Entertainment

For Blu-ray to be a success, Sony needs players in people’s homes, and that’s where the new BDP-S300 comes in at US $599 – 40% less than the previous $999 model. Wouldn’t the PS3 be the preferred option for most digital consumers?

In the space of a few months, the cost of buying a standalone Blu-ray player has dropped by 40% from Sony, with their new player, the BDP-300, offering 1080p output over HDMI, 24 frames per second for film quality playback, CD and DVD playback, AVCHD disc format playback for Sony’s (and other manufacturers’) new HD video cameras, Dolby Digital Plus Decoding and multichannel linear PCM digital audio output via HDMI.

Most importantly, there’s also faster performance than the older unit which often took two to three seconds to respond after a button press on the remote control.

Instead of the much larger box that is the original $999 Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray player, the S300 is thankfully much smaller, resembling DVD players sold today, a trend that will only continue with future models, much as happened with CD and DVD players before it.

Interestingly, the ‘regular’ version of the PS3 still offers the cheapest Blu-ray player to consumers, with the 20Gb PS3 selling for $499, and the 60Gb PS3 sells for $599, of which Sony sold 1.8 million in 2006, with millions more set to be sold this year, especially with the ‘rest of the world’ March 23 launch due very soon.

So why would you buy a standalone unit, when the PS3 offers so many more digital experiences to today’s tech savvy consumers?

This must be because the market still values dedicated devices, despite the fact the S300 is backwards compatible with a range of video discs and formats, including CDs. Dedicated devices have traditionally offered better performance that converged devices, and while there is a market for a standalone player (and sometime this year, a Blu-ray recorder, as is already available in Japan), Sony will continue manufacturing these devices, even as they would probably prefer you bought a PS3 instead.

Nevertheless, the future of the standalone Blu-ray player is, over time, increasingly lower prices, something that won’t happen anywhere near as quickly as a device like the PS3. Manufacturers are promising that by the time this year’s Christmas/holiday season rolls around, Blu-ray players will be under $500 – and could even be cheaper than that, as different manufacturers entice consumers to buy their latest models.

So far, Blu-ray seems to be winning the race, with more movies available on Blu-ray disc compared with HD DVD, with that likely to continue to be the case in the short term at least. To date, Blu-ray discs are also outselling HD DVDs at almost three to one, with 80% of new PS3 owners reportedly also choosing to buy one or more Blu-ray movies to watch when they made the original purchase.

Yet there is the potential of salvation from the adult industry for HD DVD, which is not being actively discouraged from releasing HD adult movies on the format. While Sony is reported to not be allowing their own duplication factories to press adult Blu-ray movies, and other duplicators not overly keen to help either, possibly for fear of offending Sony, at least one adult manufacturer is claiming, after a long search, to have found a Blu-ray duplicator ready to do business.

Should this market prove popular, with hold ups on the Blu-ray side, some analysts believe it could play a part in getting more HD DVD players into homes than Blu-ray, and should that happen, movie studios might not have any choice but to release movies on HD DVD to reach the largest market.

But there’s a lot of “ifs” in that analysis, and with a Blu-ray duplicator found ready to duplicate blue movies, adult content may never become the wedge that it is being predicted to be. It also forgets expected massive sales of the PS3 over its lifetime, guaranteeing a massive base of users with Blu-ray capable PS3’s in the market, many of which will be hooked up to an appropriately big and flat screened LCD, plasma or other display technology.

While the initial numbers look good for Sony and Blu-ray, and the first skirmish won, the war is still not yet over. Still, high definition movies are expected to be big money earners for movie studios over the next few years, as what was once the craze for DVD players turns into a craze for high definition players hooked up to glorious high-def TVs.

If only this transition wasn’t being marred by the Blu-ray and HD DVD war – the uptake and profits would be even larger. Now, the latest players not only have legally downloading movies to contend with, but the PS3, which will soon be able to download movies too. 

Still, which format will eventually win won’t make any lasting difference to the unstoppable high definition revolution. If you aren’t already in the high definition club, chances are that pretty soon, you will be. Welcome!