First reports of Best Buy's HD DVD demo: disappointing
By Matt Burns 
posted Apr 18th 2006 5:03PM
posted Apr 18th 2006 5:03PM
Oh boy. This is par for the course we guess. Today is HD DVD's launch on the world and Best Buy seems to be dropping the ball. One of our readers, Jim, dropped us a note saying that he went down to his local BB only to find a non-HD movie playing! He asked why and the salesman said that's what the manager said to do. Product of the man.
Yet another reader wrote in and indicated that his Best Buy was also only running a normal DVD. Nate was also confused about this and asked why. Yet again, the salesman indicated that this was the direction of the manager.
WHAT?!?! Come on Best Buy...Please tell us no one else has seen this.
I went, and they tried to put in a HD DVD demo disc. It froze the machine. The employee said it was the third time that happened today. He had to unplug and plug it back in to get it to restart.
When I visited Best Buy on Saturday they also had a regular DVD in the unit. No HD DVDs were anywhere to be found...
Par for the course indeed. Best Buy is a great place to shop as long as you know what you want and don't need to rely on their help to find what you need.
This is so typical for Best Buy. When I went to buy and upconverting DVD player they had it hooked up to an HDTV with component cables. When asked why no HDMI or DVI the said the manger says it to expensive to open a cable. SO shortside they are!!!
the best buy I went to had a hd dvd demo playing on the sony sxrd.
As far as I understand it, there's a reason for it. We don't have the rights to show any of the HD DVDs. Don't blame the workers at the store, blame the policy makers. Blame the manufacturers. Blame the studios. Even though it would sell the product, we don't particularly want to get sued over it. So as for now, regular DVDs will be what you see in the HD DVD player, but there should be HD demo discs coming soon if what I hear is true.
I went down to Bestbuy today and bought my HD-DVD player and two discs (Last Samurai and Serenity). I had to reach under the Tobshiba display unit to get the box with my player and the two BestBuy guys were standing there trying to get the demo model to work. They were having all kinds of problems and didn't have it working by the time I left.
However, I got mine home and while the setup process is less than straightforward was watching the Last Samurai in HD in about 20 minutes. It looked great! I'm going to watch Serenity tonight.
I wish my Best Buy had been playing a regular DVD. After hearing the HD-DVD players were in stores, I went straight to the back of the store, only to find the unit hooked up to a Westinghouse flat panel with a big "disc error" message on the screen. Out of curiosity I opened the tray and out popped a DVD+R with a "demo" label written in black marker on it. Pretty lame.
#6: Boloni! there are no such broadcasting rights for retailers., only for re-broadcasters such as shopping channels, stores such as Best "Lies" can reproduce any feed from cable,satellite, over-the-air antenna and pre-recorded material that's sold in YOUR store. Retailers already have a license to sell the mateials, so re-broadcasting it doesn't violate any trademarks or rights over the material when it's use for promotional in-store purposes.
Is amusing how Best "Lies" managers and it's idiotic employees will find any excuse to justify their poor ways the do business. Their way to handle business it's "Get it our way, and shut up" "HDMI cables are pricey", come on! Best Lies, spend money to EARN money, you already sell every single crappy item in there at MSRP.
I work home theater at a Best Buy in the Dallas/Ft Worth region. We have the HD-A1 running with a demo DVD provided by Toshiba (Containing an HD/SD comparison clip, and nine movie trailers... the same disc presented on the HD-DVD road tour Toshiba had last month.)
Since our manager wanted it on an endcap, the only HD large-screen we have on endcap is a Panasonic 50" plasma (TH-50PX60U), and I'm disappointed with how it looks on that screen. Pretty much, the HDMI does a terrible job in having the image converted to 720p (at least, on that monitor), so I dont think it would endear itself to anyone not possessing a 1080p television.
Honestly, the Jarhead trailer showing off our direct hard-drive feed looked better than on the HD-DVD demo.
Reading the comments about other Best Buy presentations leaves me disheartened, but not surprised. There really hasn't been any full training actively promoted for the technology... all the knowledge my store's department possesses has been mostly due to our personal adamance about the technology. Not everyone who gets into Best Buy's Home Theater department are there for a love of the technology (Magnolia professionals excluded, though a few of them are just as clueless), so not too many of them will know what the heck they're talking about with the new formats (Half my department had never heard about the benefits of Dolby Digital Plus or DTS HD until I started passing it along last week).
As far as the comments about managers making requirements detrimental to the presentation of the new format, I think too many of them are more concerned about whether they are to be affected by the impending company-wide store-level layoffs than to have any concern over a new technology, which is even more depressing.
I'm not trying to justify, just vent...
The BB I went to in Chicago had it setup but only played a demo disk with trailers? And they had HD movies on display and ready to buy. Why wouldn't they just play a movie? I'm not a big BB fan. Actually I love ABT Electronics in Il. The store rocks!
Gee, was this the Manassas, VA Best Buy that was playing the SD DVD? I also went into BB to give a peek and they too had an SD-DVD playing in their Toshiba HD-DVD player. They even had the Last Samurai HD-DVD case sitting right next to the player but still opted to play the SD disc for whatever reason.
The "theater guy" in that department also told me to wait for the Blu-Ray players because they will play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. I didn't even want to bother explaining to him his erroneous thinking on that.
Every time I go to Best Buy I hear total fabrications and misinformation spewing from their sales staff. You have to wonder that the uninformed customer is going to believe this crap.
I just want to add that right now there is a lawsuit against Best Buy for showing copyrighted material in store, if anyone notices on the copyrights for DVDs it says FOR HOME USE ONLY, being played in store does violate that. Anyway I did talk to one of my managers who made a phone call to our district manager and we were allowed to play Phantom of the Opera (not my first choice but closest to PG out of the 3 launch titles) on the HD DVD display until the Demo disc arrived, which fortunately was later that night. Apparently Toshiba had trouble manufacturing the Demo discs and did not have enough ready by launch time (not a very well planned launch to begin with) and us employees at Best Buy just had to deal with what we were handed.
Years ago when DVDs had begun to take over from laserdisc, I went into a Best Buy looking for a player that would handle both. The blue-shirted moron told me that any laserdisc player would also play DVDs, and opened the tray to show me that there was an indentation the right size for DVDs.
I haven't asked a Best Buy employee for so much as the correct time since then.