Your next Christmas present: $299 Blu-ray player

Stephen Withers
Monday, 05 March 2007 01:54

Your IT - Home IT

Sony Electronics president Stan Glasgow's widely reported comment that 2007 will see substantial drops in Blu-ray player prices came as no surprise, but the suggestion that the company could go as low as $US299 has raised some eyebrows.

Most Blu-ray players have been selling for around $US1000 or more, but Sony has already announced its $US599 BDP-S300.

Experience shows that consumer electronics technologies do drop in price as time passes after their introduction, but a drop of 60 to 75 percent in around 18 months would be unusual.

Still, that same experience shows that there are critical prices at which everybody and their dogs go out and buy the new device.

With CD players, it was $A200 - vinyl disappeared from music stores very quickly once this threshold was reached.

For DVD players, it was $A100. That lower figure reflects the massive drop in electronics prices, probably due as much to the growth of manufacturing in China as technological advances. But once that price was reached the number of installed players soared and sales of discs took off in a big way, with people slipping them into the supermarket trolley with the week's groceries.

Although Sony (which also makes the Playstation 3, which is seen as a viable budget Blu-ray player in some quarters) has previously expressed concern that DVD player prices fell to commodity levels too quickly, perhaps it has its eye on movie sales on the new format.