RSSPanasonic BD-Live player's price tag shrinks
By Tim Conneally | Published November 5, 2008, 2:54 PM
The DMP-BD50, Panasonic's entry-level BD-Live player, has still to be officially released, but has surfaced several times online at various price points. It has again appeared, at its lowest price yet.
Panasonic's first BD-Live Blu-Ray machine premiered at CES this year, showing off the extra features that can be obtained by connecting a Blu-ray player to the Internet. At the time, there was no launch date or price, but Panasonic told BetaNews that it would be watching how the market changes before deciding on anything.
The device received an initial price of $699.99 back in May, but the company was vague with its release information, projecting only "Spring" as its launch date.
With no further details, spring eventually passed and enthusiasts were left waiting and wondering. Then, the device briefly appeared for sale on Circuit City's site for $429.99.
The DMP-BD50 has emerged once again, this time on Amazon with an MSRP of $299, and selling for only $276. At that price, it is the cheapest out-of-the-box BD-Live enabled player (with no firmware upgrade needed) on the market.
High-Def Digest reported in October that the popularity of BD-Live proved to be unexpectedly high, when BD-Live servers were overwhelmed by the amount of traffic related to the release of Iron Man. Even with increased bandwidth in preparation for the release, many users were still unable to access bonus content.
I turns out the one feature that HD-DVD had out of the gate, which was online interactivity and BD didn't wasn't that big of a deal.
Now that BD has BD-Live, it's like .... meh.
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Did I miss something or are people here saying that you will need to spend over a $1000 to appreciate BR with a relatively decent HD TV and then in the same breath say it isn't a niche product?
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??? The BD50 has been on sale since June. I have one as do many others... are you sure you don't mean the BD55 and BD35 which was announced this summer..? I think you've confused the BD50 announcement at CES with the recent announcement of the BD55.. two different players.
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$276 is still not going to cut it. There is multiple reasons why Blu-Ray is remaining a niche product and that price tag is one of them.
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Your kidding me right? $276.00 is not going to cut it? If your going to spend a $1,000.00++ on a nice TV.... get the player to go with it. What you waiting for the $59.00 blu-ray? If you cant afford the player, then your TV is too small and you don't need to buy one, go play with the children and buy an up convert if your that cheap.
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That must be why the BRD sections of almost every store have doubled in size in the last few months. That must be why you are getting free players when you buy a TV at certain premium stores such as Crutchfield or HH Gregg. That must be why the industry is making the push to HD. There must be a demand for it somewhere.
Just because YOU cannot afford it, doesn't mean its a niche product. As said in the other reply to your post, if you can afford the TV, why not get a player to go with it. Upconverting DVD players just won't cut it as you lose out on nearly 5x the pixels and quality. Upconversion might be good enough on a 26inch CRT or a 32inch LCD, but on a nice 42-56inch LCD/Plasma/Oled/SED, it doesn't cut it. You will see far more pixelation on a larger TV with upconversion than need be. You cannot make up content (additional data) by simply converting it to a higher resolution.
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Did I miss something - the product on the Amazon site is a BD35K - not the BD50
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