Comments on: Panasonic prices DMP-BD50 at $700, releases more details

Panasonic prices the DMP-BD50 Blu-ray player at $700, and releases more details, including the ability to output DVDs at 24 frames per second.

[crazycarl1999]

Come on, I'd buy a Blue-Ray player if it were priced at $200, there are plenty of high end players out there already, it's pathetic that the "winning" HD technology is still priced out of reach of the vast majority of consumers.

[Wes#1]

Too much is being made of the "Profiles" (1.0 vs 2.0), trying to get people to "upgrade" to junk features when all we really want is to play the MOVIE and not spend a fortune on the machine. The manufacturer who drops a stripped-down, $199 Blu-ray player on the market will find orders outpacing supply -- something that this $700 Panasonic will never see. Just look at what Visio did for the flat-screen TV market; the big boys are now scrambling and Visio has gone from a nobody to a major player.

[Woodrow_Packer]

US prices for BD players reached their low point in Dec. 2007, at $299, in the final phases of the battle with HD-DVD. Now that the battle is won, the two victorious samurai insist on the spoils of war. Sony and Pansonic did not slay Toshiba, or wine, dine, and entice the Hollywood studios, for nothing.

BD player prices will stay high until the format is threatened by a high definition alternative, perhaps fiber optic downloads or even tiny flash memory cards, which are falling in price and could allow one to store a movie library in a book-sized album. The other alternative might be hard drive media servers equipped for remote control and do not require a PC. Trekstor sells something of this sort, although not specifically geared to AVCHD.