What counts in Blu-ray, HD DVD?
p2p news / p2pnet: Which would concern you more about the next player you buy? Its looks, or its compatibility?
It was, “shocking how entirely un-high-tech most of the Blu-ray and HD DVD players on display looked” at the Consumer Electronics Show, says CNET News.
“Each of the formats was represented by machines from many of the leading consumer electronics manufacturers – Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, RCA, Mitsubishi and so on – yet one would have walked away from perusing each of the exhibits with a sense that the companies had neglected line items for design in their budgets.”
Oh dear.
On the other hand, “Consumers, confused over the brewing battle between next-generation DVD technologies, are not alone: top US electronics retailers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas called the war ‘nightmarishly unfriendly’ and ’stupid’,” says Reuters, going on:
“Stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA may sell millions of devices, either HD DVD or its rival, Blu-ray, and some day one version could be obsolete, drawing the ire of their customers. What’s more, many will chose not to buy any device, instead waiting for one format to win.”
And that means from now electronics retailers will probably have going to display “sundry devices related to both formats, including DVD players, movies and other programming that play on them, and accessories,” says the story.
It doesn’t mention store staff are also going to have to learn to (try) explain the differences to all those confused consumers who are, after all, what it’s all about in the first place.
Furthermore, “Those boxes will crowd against standard DVD players, as well as digital video recorders, like those made by TiVo, creating many – perhaps too many – choices for shoppers who want to enjoy advanced TV viewing features,” says Reuters.
Back to appearances, will consumers judge a player by looking at its cover?
Mitsubishi’s prototype Blu-ray was “big and kind of intimidating,” says CNET’s Daniel Terdiman. “It had few visible buttons, and I couldn’t decide if that meant the machine would have a simple and elegant user interface or whether it had only a small number of features. Either way, it was not at all impressive to look at.
But the honour for “worst-looking” went to Sony’s BDP-S1, “its first attempt at a standalone Blu-ray player. The machine is huge and thick and had the same kind of buttons on its front as Sony’s old Trinitron TVs. Coming from the company that’s championing Blu-ray, the BDP-S1 felt like a betrayal of the principles of modern industrial design.”
And the players at the HD DVD exhibit didn’t look any better, says Terdiman, the worst being RCA’s prototype, “a huge, bulky monstrosity of a device that looked like it should have had ‘Betamax’ imprinted on it somewhere.
But he thought the prototype player from HD DVD backer Toshiba didn’t look too bad, although, “It was bigger than I would’ve liked, and had some pretty unimpressive looking buttons behind a flip down door on the front, but at least it had one somewhat modern feature: two USB ports.”
Also See:
CNET News – Blu-ray, HD DVD players: clunky, unimpressive, January 9, 2006
Reuters – Anger over DVD format wars, January 9, 2006
January 10th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Sony proved a while back that appearence impacts sales with two radios identical in every way except appearence.
The author seems used to DVD players being small. These high definition players are the newest thing and they’ll get smaller as technology progresses. Early red laser DVD players were bigger than the ones today.
If I HAD to buy one of these I’d take the ugly compatible one. You can hide it in a cabinet with doors. What good is a pretty player that doesn’t have any discs to play? It will decorate the garage then the landfill. But since nobody’s forcing me to buy these I’ll wait for their format war to end. They’ll probably come out with hybrid players that read both formats in a few years and if they don’t I’ll just have that much more money in my wallet that I didn’t spend. Their loss more than mine.
January 10th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
There was a format war on the recordable DVD not too long ago as well. Which one won? Well, neither really. All manufacturers did was create an optical drive that could write to both the +R/+RW and the -R/-RW. Consumers didn’t seem to care too much.
I understand it’s a little different because non-recordable media will be produced, but the preface is the same: just create a dvd player than can play it all
January 10th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Well, I know whenever I’m watching a DVD I spend over half the time admiring how cool my DVD player looks….
That story was a waste of ink. Size may have some relevance, but how the players look? What a load of crap.
January 11th, 2006 at 4:44 am
I don’t buy equipment for the color it is, I don’t buy it to match the interior because I am not a decorator. I buy equipment to do its function, nothing else.
I’m with the crowd that says I’ll wait. Since the manufacturers can’t make up their minds due to the content crowd, it’s a no brainer, no sale attitude for me and many others. Far to many got caught with the Betamax loss for me to be the only one that will feel this way.