If you've been holding back, hoping that
Blu-ray players will come down in price, you're going to be waiting awhile. In a recent interview with News.com, Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow stated
that it will probably take another three years before the price of Blu-ray players drops below $400.
When will Blu-ray
players drop in price to become a mainstream product?
Glasgow: If you go back to when DVDs came into play, it took about three
years until they got into price points of $299 to $399. I suspect it's about the same thing here with Blu-ray. I think it's going to
take up to three years to get down to those price points, possibly a little longer. But I would assume it's similar to DVD.
We
have some control over (the cost of the) components. There are a lot of components in that product. Once you get volumes up, you get
yields up, and you get efficiencies up; the prices go down on the components.
I'm sure Toshiba and other HD DVD backers are
going to eat this up. As it is, you can already get Toshiba's second generation HD DVD player, the HD-A2, for less than $400. If you'd like to read more,
News.com's entire interview can be found here.
