Again, while this may be true the likely reason will be a fall in DVD sales due to the inevitable increasing viability of downloads, not a massive surge in Blu-ray adoption.
For Blu-ray to succeed to current DVD levels, more has to happen than just a sub-$200/sub-$100/whatever-your-personal-threshold-for-affordability BD player has to arrive. Investing in Blu-ray means buying an HDTV (and a substantial HDTV, not a $250 ATSC set) as well as a BD player. While you can see the HD difference on a $500 32" set, realistically the threshold at which DVD starts to look horrible requires far greater expenditure than that.
Especially with the economy being what it is, it's hard to see how BD can succeed that quickly. DVD, at least, had the benefit of a strong (if weakening) economy behind it, with 2000 being the make-or-break year and the economy still rolling high on Y2K programmer salaries and the .com boom. By the time the economy broke, sometime in mid-2001, player prices were extremely decent. And DVD didn't require anything be upgraded to see the difference or exploit the advantages. The total investment back in 2000 was around $200-250, or $500 if you wanted a sound system to go with it.
Today the total minimum investment to get anything substantially better than DVD out of Blu-ray is around $1,500. This assumes you're happy keeping your old receiver, otherwise the price goes beyond $2,000. Plasma and LCD prices don't seem to be falling (TVs are getting bigger for the same price, but the market seems to have decided that around $700 is "right" for a low-end large screen of the sort Engadget's readers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.)
I just don't see it. I don't see BD sales in 2012 being comparable (even at 50%) to DVD sales today.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Again, while this may be true the likely reason will be a fall in DVD sales due to the inevitable increasing viability of downloads, not a massive surge in Blu-ray adoption.
For Blu-ray to succeed to current DVD levels, more has to happen than just a sub-$200/sub-$100/whatever-your-personal-threshold-for-affordability BD player has to arrive. Investing in Blu-ray means buying an HDTV (and a substantial HDTV, not a $250 ATSC set) as well as a BD player. While you can see the HD difference on a $500 32" set, realistically the threshold at which DVD starts to look horrible requires far greater expenditure than that.
Especially with the economy being what it is, it's hard to see how BD can succeed that quickly. DVD, at least, had the benefit of a strong (if weakening) economy behind it, with 2000 being the make-or-break year and the economy still rolling high on Y2K programmer salaries and the .com boom. By the time the economy broke, sometime in mid-2001, player prices were extremely decent. And DVD didn't require anything be upgraded to see the difference or exploit the advantages. The total investment back in 2000 was around $200-250, or $500 if you wanted a sound system to go with it.
Today the total minimum investment to get anything substantially better than DVD out of Blu-ray is around $1,500. This assumes you're happy keeping your old receiver, otherwise the price goes beyond $2,000. Plasma and LCD prices don't seem to be falling (TVs are getting bigger for the same price, but the market seems to have decided that around $700 is "right" for a low-end large screen of the sort Engadget's readers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.)
I just don't see it. I don't see BD sales in 2012 being comparable (even at 50%) to DVD sales today.