QVC debuts Venturer HD DVD player
A snip at just £169.62 (plus P&P of course)
Updated Venturer's anticipated cut-price SHD7001 HD DVD player went on sale this morning on the QVC home shopping channel for less than was expected. At £162.62 (or two easy payments of £84.96), it's the cheapest standalone HD DVD player on the market.
First announced at IFA, we covered the SHD7001 back in September. Then in November it was announced the QVC home shopping channel would sell the device exclusively.
Venturer's SHD7001: only available on QVC
According to the presenters, the device is only on sale until midnight tonight. However, we suspect the deal will be repeated again at a later date. The player comes bundled with HD DVD copies of Hulk and Troy, plus a voucher entitling you to five free HD DVDs via a mail-in offer from the European HD DVD Promotion Group.
It also comes with an HDMI cable, though the player provides component-video and composite-video outputs too. There's a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port on the back for linking HD DVDs to online content, and both digital optical and analogue audio outputs.
Plunging player prices could be the critical factor in revealing a winner in the Blu-ray vs HD DVD format war, as we covered earlier this month. Many consumers are still confused about whether to invest in HD DVD or Blu-ray, and the high cost of players has allowed them to step back from the debate. However, falling prices have brought both technologies within reach of a greater number of consumers, paving the way for a more unequivocal choice of format.
Update: It seems this offer was QVC's "Special Value" of the day, and the Venturer is actually still available on the QVC website, but for the upped price of £206 plus £6.95 P&P.
COMMENTS
Huh?
"I hope I'm not the only one who can barely tell the difference between so-called HD and DVD pictures."
Am I one of the few who CAN see a big difference between HD and SD?
What sort of equipment have some of you used?
To HD or not....
I third (or whateverth by now) that lot. DVD had the advantage of being a ton better than VCR for a nominal cost. HD offers an incremental improvement at massive cost (new telly, new player and unknown "FUD factor" in HDCP).
BTW, VHS won 'cos Sony licensed Beta tech while JVC stuck VHS in the public domain. Nobody likes paying one of their major competitors for the privilege of building a competing product. Anyhow, the result was that Beta players remained expensive objects from a select few manufacturers while VHS costs plummeted in a hail of cheap copies to a level that the mass market was prepared to pay. As usual, it took the content providers so long to wake up and smell the coffee that for a while it was possible to buy a new VCR for less than the cost of a recent-release film to play on it.
DVD v HD or Blu ray
The new formats look very impressive for the Americans who suffer with TV picture quality no better than the UK had in the 1960's; but the basic HD picture is only slightly better than UK broadcast TV (100 lines extra)
1080 IS a visible improvement, but not so big as to be worth upgrading; if my TV blew up tomorrow I MIGHT go 1080p, but not before.
TBH, having watched broadcast TV on a hideously expensive Panasonic Plasma and comparing it to my last-of-the-line Panasonic 32" CRT, my CRT wins hands down!!
DVDs etc look no better on the plasma than on my CRT either, and freeview looks hideous on the plasma.
Emperor’s New Clothes
Personally I think HD is a little bit a case of emperor’s new clothes. But if you are going to do it, signup for lovefilm who have a decent HD range and rent them out for about a pound a time depending on your rental plan.
New shiny thing - please buy me
Weird - no-one seems to have a problem moving to lower quality LCD/Plasma from the higher quality CRT. If you can take that much of a quality hit and be a happy viewer then the difference between standard DVD and BR/HD is not even going to be discernible unless your TV is very low quality.
As for disc capacity - who cares - there are far better back-up and archive options available - anyone writing that amount of data to an optical drive really needs to think about their plan again.
