Tom's Hardware either biased or got gift from Toshiba...

...maybe along with The Inquirer for mirroring such an anti-Sony nonsense.
There is no monopoly, the BDA is a large association of manufacturers.
Why Tom's Hardware doesn't point out the fact that the LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray burner and HD-DVD player combo drive for PCs is falling in price so much that in Europe for example you can buy it in OEM/Bulk version for as low as 200Euros...?
Sony is expected it lower the price of the PS3 down to $299 and €299 respectively during 2008. BD-R discs have started falling price as well down from previos $15-18 dollars now to just $8-9 a piece, and they are expected to go down to $4-5 during the year.

Better analysis please...

Not suprising really....Bound to happen in the short term, and no I am not making excuses for Sony before you say. All the players were reduced to next to zero margins (or subsidized) while competing with Toshiba...Give it a few months and the competion starts rolling off the production lines prices will drop...

Sony over 360?

you must be out of your mind to say that the ps3 hardware is superior to that of the 360 !! Get your facts right ! Oh and by the way I'm writing this on my iPhone ! Ha! One more thing the only piece of harwste the ps3 has over a 360 would be the player other than that the 360 takes the lead.

AT adds: Presumably your Iphone doesn't have a spellchecker.

Hmmmm I Smell A Con Here

It makes me wonder if they are hacking up the prices to sell more PS3's. Think of it put prices up on BR players alone PS3 can play games and Blu-Ray which is £279-£350 depending on the package.

Many people will go for the PS3 with it been a games console. A pretty nice scam that may come back to haunt Sony on the ass.

Blu-ray players

To be honest, if I was going to buy a player I'd rather buy a PS3 than a standalone player.

As they're both about the same sort of price (in my local Makro Wholesaler), I just think the PS3 would be a better buy as I could use it as a games console and Blu-ray player until the standalone player prices come down.

I did the same with DVD, bought a PS2 first when they went down to about £150 and then eventually invested in a DVD player (about 2 years later I think).

I'm sure once more companies start making BD players the prices will go down as they try and out-sell each other.

Rob

The Realms of Relativity ….

The Realms of Relativity ….
Without being balanced AND be able to see the complete picture, everything becomes relative. Including pricing. Those who pine for guidance because they are fearful [of making the first move, say, or facing their true self] and those whose intellect is always attached to their genitalia because they somehow know that their mission in life is to be special, like leading the blinded fearful, will always come to some agreement about their relationship. Like pricing.

It might be unbelieveable, but a lot of imitation goods are actually better made than the original items. Which means? That pricing is about fashion and screwing with the fantasies and minds of the worshipful. “That BD player @ $200 is so cheap”, the groupie screams. Eh? Can anyone grow the wheat, mill the flour and bake the bread from it for, say, $1 ? And if not, what will happen if staples like bread is charged at, say, $10/loaf? Rioting, right? So, it’s all about politics, competition and economies of scale. That’s why MS OS and BD are free to value their monopolistic offerings at “what the market can tolerate”. Consortium? Of Ali Babas, dear groupie. Don’t believe it eh? “Because they have to setup factories, file the patents, hire the real “brains”, blah, blah..” Really? How about, “Only when the pimp has too many whores to manage will he ‘finks about dropping the price” [and that’s called a loss-leader]. And how come some humans can claim that they are worth ZY billions? Because they cannot see the complete picture of what greed is. It is just the other face of fear.

Complete codswallop eh? Now imagine that because you are a person whose mission in life is “special”, you are being offered all sorts of “gourmet” food and surrounding you are hungry and starving people. Would you decline the tributes or would you accept it, “only if those tree-stumps are not there”. Almost without exception, those who are worth “millions”, “billions” [different words for indulgences], regardless of “charities”, “trusts” and other mechanisms of “deceitful immortality”, are fearful & greedy. How so? Because Love [i.e unconditional/absolute love] is not about accumulation but about throughput. Heard any zillionaire putting his money to make himself better first? Only utility has value, not weaponry and the difference between the two depends on idiocy/lunacy or love.

Human intellect [i.e. activity] has only one value and that is to produce idiots whereas the only value that human emotions [i.e. inactivity] have is to create lunatics. It’s only the degree of latency and manifestation that is different. On the other hand, Real Intelligence is, at the same time, Joy because they are not relatives. They are one and the same. Like The Sun and Sunlight [which is one complete picture]. The human minds cannot judge/have no means of judging what is beyond the capability of the human minds. An idiot or a lunatic can only see the same, not Infinity/Gravity, though they can sense It.

Smart move on Sony's part

By making the PS3 the most sensible DVD player to buy (don't want to get stuck without HD, don't want to pay more than necessary) they kill off XBox and grab the set top box market with their proprietary platform.

They're just doing with Blu-ray and XBox what Microsoft did with Windows and office.

Pretty slick

POS3 not superior!

POS3 superior to the 360? Quit what your smoking! All the POS3 is good for is a cheap blu-ray player. The less-superior format won this war (HD-DVD IMO is still better). Hey nick, go with the best console this generation, the 360. The POS3 is this gens gamecube!

Comments need editing, too...

See what you've done allowing comments? You get people like sirkillar masturbating in public all over the Inq's pages. Can't you just edit drivel like that out?

$

Actually the dollar is just falling more and more every day.

$400 soon = $300 recently

Not Surprised...

I'm not at all surprised, yet they're just shooting themselves in the foot. All this is going to do is make the inevitable happen that much faster - streaming movies on demand. No more scratched/lost DVD's, and most new computers can handle streaming content nowadays. Maybe the Apple TV isn't such a bad idea?

Ouch!

Sony over 360?
"Oh and by the way I'm writing this on my iPhone ! Ha! "

"AT adds: Presumably your Iphone doesn't have a spellchecker."

I'm surprised the Inq know that spellcheckers exist!

That was a little b*tchy AT considering the number of spelling and grammatical errors that are published everyday at the inq (your funny psuedo words withstanding).

on the what?

Did someone actually comment:
"haunt Sony on the ass" ?

MS Fanboi's

You can always tell a MS fanboi by their comments. Usually disregarding facts and subjecting their own, that, majority of the time, have no reliable source/evidence. Blind loyalty, just the way the Vole likes it.

As for the article, I could only assume Sony is trying to push the sales of PS3's to surpass Xbox, which it's well on its way to doing, all they need is MGS4 now.

XB360's LOL

At least we are getting the far superiour tech with the blue ray.
You really need to get off the 360 band wagon the PS3 smokes the 360 if every way except it doesnt have any games. The PS3 has about 30X the processing power of the 360. I just wish I could load up a OS on the PS3 because if I could my would replace my PC with a PS3 in a second. OHYA and you get a blue-ray for for $399 CAD , sceaming deal.

What A Load Of Rubbish

What evidence does the writer have that Sony have 'jacked up the price'. Sony does not set retail price in the UK or Europe and it is illegal for them to do so. As a Sony dealer the price I pay for Blu-ray decks has not gone up, it has only ever gone down.

It is up to individual retailers to set prices and if they decide they can make more money in the short term by raising prices then it is up to them but the manufacturer has nothing to do with it.

FUD

Sinking Dollar...blame Bushie!

Biased article

Taking the "average" Pricegrabber price is not realistic. Some sites have low stock on certain items and they jack up the price. This is a situation where the "median" price would work better.

Also, the exchange rate has been brutal on imported products. A lot of overseas manufacturing companies are losing money and therefore increasing prices due to the USD exchange rate.

When compared to the value of the dollar, the Blu-ray drives are actually cheaper....hahaha

So, it really depends on how you write the article. If you're a thoughtless sheep, then you would think Blu-ray drives are really more expensive.

PS3 FTW

Dude the Xbox 360 is in need of a redesign. It is overheated and noisy wereas the ps3 is cool and quiet. Who wants something noisy in there media center. The Xbox is so last year. Get with the times and the awesome PS3! I don't even use it for gaming. And the dude wishing you could load a OS on the PS3...U CAN!!

Says it all, really....

> At least we are getting the far superior tech with the blue ray. You really need to get off the 360 band wagon the PS3 smokes the 360 if every way except it doesnt have any games.

Kind of say it all, doesn't it. The reason why there aren't that many games is that the PS3 is a bitch to write software for. We've known how to make PS3 type hardware for decades; its still mostly confined to supercomputer type applications because those applications can exploit parallelism efficiently. (BTW -- People have made supercomputers from PS3s.)

Its no good having the superior technology if you can't use it. It may turn out that the only reason why there are any games at all for the thing is that Sony's been subsidizing the thing.

One thing needs stating. BluRay isn't "superior tech". Its actually a bit of a hack, and its not even a finished one at that. Don't confuse "more" with "better".

Re Not suprising

'I'm not at all surprised, yet they're just shooting themselves in the foot. All this is going to do is make the inevitable happen that much faster - streaming movies on demand.'


Streaming is quite a few years away...At least at HD levels. The infrastructure is simply not there. Look at the current complaints at ISP bandwidth capping/download speeds even now. If we all started viewing movies/TV on demand it would certainly choke and maybe (?) worse we would all be forced go on a metered type of service and bills would rise...

Back onto point, any price increase is only going to very temporary. Prices will certainly be dropping by christmas as the market takes advantage of the single format.

What?

"Dude the Xbox 360 is in need of a redesign. It is overheated and noisy wereas the ps3 is cool and quiet."

The dvd-rom on the 360 is the most noisy thing in the whole console. "ps3 is cool and quiet." Really? I had a ps3 for about a week and it alone ran hotter then both my 360 and my tv and my reciever running at the same time. I don't know what that guy was smoking when he said he would replace his PC with his PS3 in a second the PS3 will never be as good as a PC. The 360 may be old but the GPU makes up for the lack of processing power which is why almost every game for the 360 can play at 1080p AND still use anti ailiasing where as the PS3 most games can only do 720p. The GPU on the 360 has a 10meg as a dedicated buffer for AA, now thats intelligent design.

Remember, there is no substitute for conventional power, after all, the original Xbox was only a 750MHz celeron and a GeForce3.
while I may sound like a fanboy (not fanboi) the PS2 is still my favorite console, but I still recognize better technology. Between the PS3 and 360, the PS3 has more processing power but the 360 has alot more raw conventional power and a more intelligent design.. The hardware not what holds the hardware.

/rant

Obviously biased article.

from an obvious Sony hater.

The Panasonic has infact dropped in price, and that's a high volume player, which has shifted lots of units.

But hey, lets forget about that one, and focus on the couple of units that have risen in price (likely because of the Yen/$ exchange rate, as if you look, it's not a constant upward trend, it's up/down/up/down).

You really have to be an idiot to believe what Nik Farell and his cronies and Toms Hardware tell you.

It's a shame, Toms Hardware used to be a decent site, it's now the mouthpiece for it sponsors.

Market made prices rise, not Sony

I'm no fan of Sony at all, but I must say that the price increases aren't their doing. Quite a few were sitting on the fence until the "war" was over. The sudden rise in demand pushed prices up in some markets.

However...
"There is no monopoly, the BDA is a large association of manufacturers"

Yes, but BDA doesn't own the patents to Blu-Ray, Sony does. That's why it's Sony that gets the $ on every disk and player sold.

Sony has ultimate control over the format, and therefore the monopoly.