Who really needs a slow hybrid DVD drive for $1200?

Angus Kidman
Monday, 08 January 2007 01:14

Your IT - Home IT

LG attracted a packed house for the official press launch of its Blu-ray/HD DVD hybrid player and drive, the Super Multi Blue, at CES. Yet despite the hype, it's hard to actually imagine too many people buying the product -- it's massively overpriced for its feature set.

Sticker shock is the most obvious problem. At $US1200 for either the BH100 player or GGW-H10N drive, it's more than 50 times the cost of a standard DVD equivalent. LG predicts that this cost will drop as volumes rise, but unless you're a tragic early adopter, who needs to spend that much money?

The price becomes doubly insulting when you look at the limitations imposed to bring the cost down to even those ridiculous levels. The player version can't actually handle audio CDs at all, and only offers a limited set of the interactive features provided by HD DVD.

Under the circumstances, calling this a hybrid is a massive, massive stretch. It's a partial hybrid at best, a messy integration at worst.

The drive version does fix both those defects, admittedly, allowing audio CDs and full HD DVD interactivity. But in order to achieve that, you end up paying the same price as for the standalone player, which defies all normal pricing conventions.

The launch also served as a useful reminder that hi-def isn't always better. During the presentation, LG boasted that Blu-ray disc loading times on its new player were a world's best 25 seconds.

That's not a record to be proud of in an industry where millisecond measurements are the norm. I'm not at all convinced that anyone should pay that amount of money to wait that long for a movie, no matter how nice the image quality is. Better to wait until it's both faster and cheaper.

Analysts have pronounced themselves skeptical of the impact a hybrid player might have. A cheaper player, with a full feature set, might help end the DVD wars, but the Super Multi Blue doesn't fit the bill.