Retailers Are Ready To Ease The Transition To BluRay

[karthick]

Retailers Are Ready To Ease The Transition To BluRay

The second biggest electronic retailer in the US, Circuit  City, has decided to help its customers who desire to return their HD DVD player.

The retailer has extended the return period from 30 to 90 days. This means that all the customers who have purchased a HD DVD player in the past three months may now return them for store credit.

Circuit City's move follows after Toshiba has officially dropped its HD DVD format, because the all the major movie studios have decided to support BluRay as the high definition optical format.

"The recent resolution of the next generation of video disc formats is an important and singular development in the marketplace," Jim Babb, Circuit City's spokesman, said in an e-mail statement quoted by AP. However, the HD DVD movies can not be returned.

The Canadian retailer FutureShop has announced a similar move on Friday. The Canadian consumers who will return their HD DVD players would get a $100 credit towards the purchase of an LG or Samsung Blu-ray and HD DVD combo player, the Canadian Press reported.

FutureShop says that its offer is available until April 3 and the consumers who have bought their HD DVD players from other retailers may apply.

Last month, six major Japanese retailers returned the HD DVD players and discs and some of them offered to their customers the possibility to switch their HD DVD player to a BluRay one.

Also, soon after the format war was officially over, all the major US retailers such as Amazon, BestBuy and CircuitCity has slashed the prices of the HD DVD players with close to 60 percent.

There are reports that there are still people who buy HD DVD players because they can improve the playback of standard DVDs.

Also, last month Sony announced two new BD-Live (Profile v2.0) ready Blu-ray players, priced at $400 and $500. The BDP-S350, which will ship sometime in the summer for $400, will feature 1080p24/60 output via HDMI, one Ethernet port and decoding of 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD.

The high-end BDP-S550, which will ship this fall, will cost $500 and will feature in addition to the slightly cheaper S350 1GB of persistent storage and decoding of DTS-HD High Resolution and DTS-HD Master Audio, as well as 7.1 analog outs. Both models have an external port for adding local storage and will support Bonus View for viewing picture-in-picture content.

Earlier this week, in a press conference held in New York on Wednesday, Stan Glascow, president of Sony Electronics, said there are some price cuts heading our way, but not as high as we expected. The Blu-ray, which now costs $399, will go to $299 by the end of the year, but the $200 price tag is just something we might see in 2009, but most certainly not this year.

Source : eFluxMedia