Panasonic's UniPhier 3 to deliver cheaper BD-Live enabled Blu-ray players
By Richard Lawler 
posted May 22nd 2008 8:09AM
posted May 22nd 2008 8:09AM
[Via AV Watch & Akihabara News]
posted May 22nd 2008 8:09AM
The percentage of returned gadgets that have nothing wrong with them.
Of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were actually broken, according to a 2008 study.
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Cheap brand name profile 2.0 BR players, apparently oil will be $50 a barrel again soon as well.
Aww you HD DUD fanboys are so pathetic...still can't get over the fact that the system you claimed was better LOST.
The consumer decided that Bluray was the best format. Deal with it.
As for this news thats great.
CONSUMER, hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Yes, the consumer. And the retailers. And the manufacturers. And the studios.
They all decided for their own reasons in favour of Blu Ray.
@Wii60Warrior
Yeah, almost as pathetic as the Blu-ray fanboys who think calling it "HD DUD" is funny and original.
The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore winner and you're a sore winner. A lame, unoriginal and immature sore winner at that. gg.
Good old Zym, first on the defense as usual with his big blu glasses on, big blu shield and blu underwear, SUPER BLU to the rescue!
Whats happening with the Funai players at Wally World Xym, have they started moving pallet loads yet as you keep predicting, hmm?
Hey engHD, whats with the profile page, haven't been able to log on for weeks, you guys ever plan on sorting it ??
Login from Blogsmith.com if you need to make changes. That's the only thing that works for me... I'm guessing it's because we signed up before Engadget started managing their own users.
So, if this WAS in the DMP-BD50, we could expect it to be "cheaper" at an MSRP of "only" $599 (like it was originally speculated/rumored to be) rather than the current $699?
WOOOO!! CHEAP BD PLAYERS FOR ALL!
I'm with DRXYM, he is right. The prices start high in new products and as things progress, ie they sell more units, find ways to make parts cheaper... the prices fall
and come more affordable. Happened with CD players in the 1980's. Happened with the first Hi-Fi VHS VCRs. Recently with regular DVD players in the late '90s which were quite pricey to start with and of course HDTV's which if you just go back a mear 3 years from now were quite a bit more money. Toshiba lost millions subsidizing each HD-DVD player and to what end?
By the fall of 2009 you see quite a few 2.0 profile Blu-ray players that are affordable.
I remember the first plasmas I saw in a store were £10,000 - POUNDS. That was for an 32" SD plasma screen. Now you can get a 46" HD plasma for less than a 1/10th of that. My first DVD player (a 2nd gen Pioneer) cost £550.
Prices always come down over time. It appears that most of the complaining about price is coming from HD DVD whiners who appear to think that CEs should subsidize their players to the tune of hundreds of dollars just because Toshiba did.
Hey, by all means, continue to pay the exhoribant prices they're demanding for hardware that isn't worth that much. I was an HD DVD supporter, yes, but I bought both my 360 addons for $200/ea and my A2 for $500 the day it came out...a year and a half ago almost. I have no problem paying a price for something I feel is worth it.
But when the PS3 does everything and more than what the BD50 does (as well as offers better upconversion if the past Panny's performance is any indication and I see no reason why it wouldn't be) for $300 less, umm...well, you do the math.
Or don't. And keep defending the ridiculously and artificially-kept high prices. I don't really care.
And save me your tired rhetoric about how DVD took forever to get below $500. This isn't DVD, this isn't 10 years and Blu-ray doesn't have the luxury of time that DVD had in order to get in and make a dent in the home video/theater market, let alone take it over. Well over 2 years after its launch, players are still coming out at prices barely below where they were at launch. That's ridiculous, regardless of what side you were on before the war ended.
sigh... that should've been "exorbitant"
I never understand why people want to treat the Blu-ray introduction pricing cycle as some kind of special case. If someone feels that prices are "exorbitant" now, then just wait. No one is being forced to buy anything. For some people, getting 1080p with lossless audio in a standalone player right now is worth a few hundred dollars over the price of a DVD player. For the rest, prices overall are going to decline quite a bit over the next few years. This is no different than it has ever been.
Oh, and you may want to check again if you think that Blu-ray player prices are "barely below where they were at launch". If you take the average cost of all the available players, I'm willing to bet that it's at 50% or below what the original cost was. I still remember those launch players that were above $1,000.
For disclosure: I bought a $399 PS3 late last year, and will only consider a standalone player in the future when full-featured ones reach $200 or under. That's just me--everyone has their own comfort zone.
@Mr. E
A few hundred more than an SD DVD player would be the $250-300 range. $700 is more than "a few hundred."
And how is $699 not much less than $999? $999 was pretty much the standard price for quite a while at Best Buy and other places. $699 is still pretty close to launch prices.
Come on, of course I wasn't making my comparison with the Chinese $49 player at Wal-Mart. Blu-ray delivers a quantum leap in video and audio performance, so a consumer who is currently trying to decide whether Blu-ray delivers value *should* be comparing prices against the DVD players that provide the best performance right now, like an upscaling Oppo (think $170-$400 range). That's really the only way to gauge whether the extra expense for Blu-ray is worth it. Heck, if someone is satisfied with a $49 special DVD player, they're probably going to want to wait for a $49 Blu-ray player too. That's going to take awhile.
In any case, I'm not really interested in playing semantic games. The point is that prices are declining. Whether they are doing so fast enough for "us" is irrelevant. People will buy when they reach their comfort zone, wherever that is.
superklye there are already players below $350 if you want them and bound to be plenty more as the holiday season heats up. You are not forced to spend a pile on a standalone if you don't want to. And I assume that those who do, do so of their own free will.
(yawn) wake me up when Blu-ray players are within the financial reach of the common folk. It's ridiculous for them to think that consumers should consider a $300-400 luxury a deal. Oh, and before I get the backlash from some crazy Blu-ray fanatic, I already own a PS3 and a decent Blu-ray library.
These arguments about price are just getting silly.
Prices are dropping in a quite predictable way. They start off high and then they fall as the product enters the mainstream. It happened with DVD, and now it is happening with Blu Ray. There will be $200 players for Christmas and probably $100-150 players next Christmas.
I understand that money is tough right now. I feel the pinch every time I go to the grocery. However, people should realize that HD anything is a luxury item, not a necessity.
HD components are expensive and $300 to $500 for anything HD is pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. All HD items are expensive costing anywhere from 2 to 10 times as much as their equivalent SD counterparts. Televisions, Tivos/DVRs, Audio Receivers, Satellite Receivers, and Game Consoles are all more expensive in the HD realm than in the SD realm.
Some people feel just fine about paying less for their first 1080p Blu-ray players than they did for their first 480i DVD players.
If people want one and can afford it now - wonderful go out and buy it. If people want one and cannot afford it now - sorry, wait six months. We already know that there will be sub-$300 units on the shelf for x-mas and many believe that the price will be sub-$250. Hell, even the PS3 is predicted to have a price cut of at least $50 by that time.
If you can afford to own a $1200-$1500 HDTV then how is a $300 Blu-ray player an over priced luxury Rob? An HD-Tivo cost $300. It seems in line. I think the fact that Panasonic has found a way to make the Uniphier chip less expensive would be nothing but good news and everyone would have a positive comment about it.
This is a great development, and will mean Matsushita will be able to cut pricing on newer models while maintaining profitability. With Sony's new BD-Live players coming up soon at lower than Panasonic pricing, I expect the downward pricing pressure to continue unabated. If Matsushita wants to keep up, they'll need to introduce a Panasonic DMP-BD70 next spring for a maximum of $299 MSRP or so, including all bells and whistles.
This is good news. The route to cheaper BR players requires more integration of functions into fewer IC's. The current players are expensive not because of soulless money-grubbing but in the utilization of many expensive IC's. The cheap HD players were only cheap because Toshiba was willing to sell below cost. This chip and others like it will reduce the parts count and retail prices. Go pick up a $30 DVD player - doesn't weigh anything does it? Why? It has only a few IC's with a few supporting passive devices. The $100 DVD players don't weigh much more. Current BR players are heavy because they have a lot of crap in them. Basically you are paying by the pound. It’s not that hard to understand is it?
Quote ccweems:
This is good news. The route to cheaper BR players requires more integration of functions into fewer IC's. The current players are expensive not because of soulless money-grubbing but in the utilization of many expensive IC's. The cheap HD players were only cheap because Toshiba was willing to sell below cost. This chip and others like it will reduce the parts count and retail prices.
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Exactly ccweems, exactly. It's all good news.
FANTASTIC!!!!!