New Wave Outpost Forum

In an industry wide effort to kiss off DVD's and force everyone to convert to Blu-Ray, I've noticed that retailers these days are pricing new DVD's at around $25.99 and lowering the prices of Blu-Ray discs. It's also becoming the new standard to load the Blu-Ray discs with all the special features they once gave you on DVD. Oh, they could easily still give you all those extras on DVD but nope....fuck you consumers!

It's kind of funny, seeing as the studios were so gung-ho in pushing a hi-def format because DVDs were getting so cheap. Now look what's happening in order to speed up Blu-ray adoption ...

I haven't bought a BD player yet. I'm holding out in hopes for a Chinese ones that can be easily made all-region (both DVd and BD). To be region-locked in the days of internet shopping is ridiculous (at least the HD DVD camp understood that).

I've also stopped buying new releases on DVD, since I don't want to re-buy them in the future on Blu-ray.

Uh, ok? I can still get thousands and thousands of DVDs for 5 bucks and less ($3 at Big Lots), but I've never found a new Blu Ray disc for $5. Probably because I'm not aware of any titles that have a $9.99 retail. It's no great secret that Warner Bros. wants everyone to move to Blu Ray and have been deliberately doing crappy DVD transfers of several blockbusters (along with making the DVD bare-bones while the Blu Ray is loaded) in order to get their wish. I'm sure you've seen their hilarious side by side comparison? Where they show some deliberately-cruddy video of a supposed DVD transfer and then the (of course) stunning Blu Ray transfer next to it.

Blu Ray is a nice format and all, but after 13 years and thousands of DVDs, I neither expect everything I have on DVD to be re-released on Blu nor intend to upgrade everything I have on DVD that is re-released on Blu. Much the same way I have thousands of VHS tapes and laserdiscs that I don't have on DVD, many of which have never been on DVD.

I haven't noticed that DVDs were getting more expensive to be honest but I did notice a price drop in Blu Ray...to about the same price as DVD's, (around $19.99) which is nice. Honestly though, as someone who has a PS3 and Blu Rays, they ain't worth getting unless you have a 1080i HD TV anyway, which I don't. Otherwise your picture quality is more or less limited to the quality of the television you're viewing it on. I approve of Blu Ray not because they "look better" but because of the exponential increase in storage capacity. A dual-layer Blu Ray supposedly holds 50GB of data, I have hard drives smaller than that.

Once BD-R becomes cheap and standardized I'll be happy to get a burner for storage reasons alone.

With regard to "old movies" not being re-released on new format, of course they won't. If you haven't noticed, the entire entertainment industry (music and movies) ONLY cares about what's new, not what's good. That's why a lot of bands especially the ones we tend to like here, are completely overlooked or ignored and are nothing more than a footnote when they come out with a new release. The greatest common denominator i.e. "buying public" are complete sheep who will do/buy whatever they're told to by their corporate masters, who are only in it for the money and don't care about quality.

I'd say most of my collection is on DVD followed closely by Beta, because I like things from the 80's and a lot of that didn't get released on DVD or if it did it was on such a small scale that I missed it entirely. I don't see myself buying Blu Rays en masse until there isn't another option, but with the price drop and the rush to push DVD out the window that may be somewhat soon.

DVD's came out in 1997 and VHS wasn't completely phased out until 2005 so it took almost 10 years. I think it'll take longer than that to phase out DVDs especially since Blu Ray players are backwards compatible (at least the PS3 is.)

-------------------------------------------------
What is love after all
but occasional steps
of a dance.........
.......In a trance?

In Canada, new release DVDs don't have as low as a "sale" price as they used to (for example, two disc special editions used to be $22, and now, they're $27). Blu-ray releases of the same movie are about $2 more than the 2-disc DVDs.

But, yeah, on the opposite end, you can get DVDs for $5, which were never that low years ago.


[i]> Once BD-R becomes cheap and standardized I'll be happy to get a burner for storage reasons alone.[/i]

The race here is also against HDD pricing, which makes me wonder about BD-R becoming successful.