Fully Equipped: When will we see the $99 Blu-ray player?

Memorex: Leading the cheap Blu-ray charge.

(Credit: Buy.com)

We've been keeping an eye on prices for Blu-ray players and it appears that a handful of budget brand models are starting to crack the $150 barrier. The other day Woot.com had the Memorex MVBD2510 player at $139.99 for a one-day sale and now TheNerds.net is selling it for $146.99 (shipping included) and Buy.com has it at $149.99. That's on top of both the Samsung BD-P1500 and the Sony BDP-S300 slipping in and out of sub-$200 territory at Amazon and other outlets.

While $150 isn't bad, I think we're going to see $99 fairly soon, with a couple of stops at $129.99. As we found out with HD-DVD players, $99 really is a magic price point, though it is worth pointing out that these budget Blu-ray players are only profile 1.1 while the $99 HD DVD players were fully up to spec and allowed for firmware upgrades via Ethernet (the cheap Blu-ray players can't be updated and sometimes simply can't play certain movies). Profile 1.1 players aren't BD-Live enabled, which means you won't be able to access certain interactive features--for better or worse.

Read the full column.

[celticbrewer]

Memorex BR player for $150 at buy.com. (At least it's a semi-decent brand name).

And of all the BR movies I've seen (many dozens), I've never used BD-Live features. I just want to watch the damn movie and maybe some cut scenes.

[bob1xxxx]

Look if blue ray going to every be truely sucessful and not fail like hd dvd the player price has to come way way down, like under 100.00 bucks, 150.00 is a good start but not enough for blue ray survial, the fast the player drop the better.