Digital Home Thoughts: High-Definition DVD Market Facing Static

""Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience," said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. One format is expected to win, just as VHS ultimately triumphed over Betamax in the video standards war. Blu-ray was tapped by many experts prior to launch as the likely victor due to its heavier studio support. But since Samsung Corp. rolled out the first Blu-ray player, priced at $1,000, in late June, Blu-ray has faced complaints of sub-par picture quality on discs, talk of component shortages for players and other technical issues. "High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular," Dybdahl said. "Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD," he said."



Well, this probably won't come as much of a surprise to our readers. Most of us here were well aware that the marketing hype the studios were spouting was just that: hype. When even the early-adopters that frequent this site say they're going to hold off for a while before buying either HD-DVD or Blu-ray, that should be your first clue. Now the retailers are all scratching their heads, saying "But Sony said it would sell like hotcakes." :roll: I don't think we're going to see any significant HD DVD sales increase until the holiday season, and even then, we'll have to (at the very least) see some price drops in Blu-ray players before anyone even thinks about buying one.