Budget HD DVD player to include even more free discs
Not much stick, plenty of carrot
Venturer's anticipated cut-price HD DVD player will, for a brief period, come effectively half price, the manufacturer announced today.
No, it's not a philanthropic gesture on the part of Venturer, and you'll still have to pay up front for the SHD7001 - it's still refusing to say how much it will charge - but until 31 January 2008, it'll come with a voucher entitling you to five free HD DVDs.
That's in addition to the two discs, Troy and Hulk, the player will bundle anyway.
Venturer's SHD7001: now with seven free HD DVDs
The extra discs come courtesy of the HD DVD Promotion Group (Europe branch), and depending on the range of titles on offer, together you'll be getting around £100 worth of discs free of charge.
When Venturer launched the SHD7001 back in September, its said the machine would retail for under £200. So thanks to the HD DVD Promotion Group, buyers will get the player effectively at half price - or less if Venturer releases the box even more cheaply than it's expected to be.
You can buy Toshiba's higher-specced HD-EP30 player for around £190, so we hope the SHD7001 comes out for a lot less than that.
Pricing will not be made public, Venturer said, until the SHD7001 goes on sale on 29 December, exclusively through the QVC shopping channel.
COMMENTS
@good deal.. etc
not trying to be picky here and am prepared to be corrected but xbox 360 PREMIUM? don't you need to buy and ELITE to get HDMI connectability?
component seems an awful drop down with a 50"plasma imho..
as for venturer.. wow!!! love to have that piece of quality brand gracing the living room. £29.99 seems like a fair price(dvd player for 9.97 or free with a bag of frozen peas) but only if I can hawk the five free disks on eBay at a tenner each..
never used QVC(likely never will), am thinking 'sheepdog' may have some sort of vested interest in the channel as he 'doth protest too much'!
final point is content..most of the movies I have watched on blu-ray have been ok but not earth shatteringly better than dvd. i am finding myself renting them but mainly using dvdrips(my own btw) and streaming(TVersity) them from the pc thru ethernet because:
a. its damn more convenient to have 300+ rips on a hard drive
b. don't have to get off my ass to change the movie for the next one
c. works and the kids can't scratch it!
you can throw as many crap free disks into a deal as you want, only the dumb looking for a cheap xmas pressie or offloading their january sale money will go for these. have to admit though will watch with interest to see what price they are sold at..
Cheap HD-DVD players set to flood the market soon.... well, when exactly?!
Has anyone noticed the arrival of these cheap players is starting to smack of the never never? The end of summer the HD-DVD consortium assured us sub £200 players will arrive en mass shortly. Then Autumn came and it changed to "flood the market in time for Christmas". Now Christmas has come (the key buying time is virtually over for stuff like this as well), and the first hint of the flood is January 2008, is one player and sold at one mail order shop. Wow, some flood. And as pointed out too, it's likely to be complete tat as well, which all but the most ill informed consumer will notice.
The HD-DVD consortium continually questions the validity of the PS3 as a Blu-ray player base, but I thought it was just rhetoric. After all, a Blu-ray player, is a Blu-ray player no matter what it is shoved into and they must know that. I guess not if they expect to win consumers over with a "flood" that has taken six months to even materialise and amounts to one bargain bin player. I was really looking forward to the arrival of these players. Not now I'm not if this is what we can expect.
Good Deal Imo
Considering the format war, I just went with the cheapest and most flexible solution I could find.
I purchased the XBOX360 Premium from them, returned the accessory pack in exchange for the HD-DVD drive and 5 HD-DVD's (I did not like the 2 games offered and I rarely need 2 controllers)
I also purchased Mass Effect.
so, £300 got me an XBox360 Premium with HDMI @ 1080p to go with my nice new shiny 50" HD Plasma, HD-DVD drive and 5 HD-DVD's, seems terribly resonable to me
High-def filler
erm, perhaps i'd find the latest high-def format more useful (and relevant) if:
[1] there was not yet another VHS/Betamax pissing match,
[2] the hardware offered truly compelling and flexible new functionality,
[3] it wasn't packed full of DRM (from the two parties known for graceless DRM hack-jobs, Sony and MS),
[4] it was priced reasonably,
[5] it was backwards-compatible, and
[6] it was not yet another half-baked solution looking for a problem, in a long series of planned-obsolescence upgrades, extending to infinity, serving no purpose other than to extract money from fools
it is ironic that Maxell announced holographic storage disks back in 2005, and the technology is now in production. the format is currently sold only to the professional media market. the disks start at 300GB, and are expected to reach 1.5TB in a few years.
the next standard is already out, but you can't hear it over the marketing noise. see here:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/computing/item_35.html
apart from that, the most compelling argument AGAINST hi-def is the content. most movies (i'd say 98%+) released over the last 10-20 years, don't even qualify as "renter". why the hell would i want to watch that crap in higher definition?
like spending hours, inspecting a turd with a magnifying glass: this is not anything i need to see in more detail, let alone waste between 1 and 4 hours of my life looking at in the first place.
high-def formats do nothing to address this problem. most of the content my wife and i watch, is perfectly viewable on a Mac laptop (which is exactly how it is actually viewed), and is available online, legally.
Forget the format, what's wrong with the content?
Is it just me or is 98% of the content available for both HD-DVD and BD complete crap (yes, even more so than most of Hollywood)? I was tempted by one of those "buy a player/get 5 discs" offers until I looked at the choice of movies and couldn't find one I'd want to watch once, let alone own. Last night I saw an ad on TV for "Underdog", for crying out loud: a movie that nobody wanted to see when it came out and its hard to imagine anybody wanting to own for the pleasure of repeated viewing...
The winning camp will be the first one to realize that the audience it should be pandering to is people who (a) have killer home theater surround sound/big screen set-ups and (b) hate going to the movies to be surrounded by noisy teenagers. In other words, Baby Boomers with lots of disposable income whose kids have left home. Focus on the movies they loved growing up like Rocky, ET, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, classic Bond, etc. rather than recent "Failed In Theaters, Make It Back In Homes" crud like Hulk, Troy, TMNT, and you've got a chance...
