Microsoft lowers price of HDDVD for Xbox 360
Microsoft has cut the price of its HD DVD high definition video player for the Xbox 360 in an effort to boost sales. The device now lists for $130, down from $260. Sales of HD DVD players have slumped ever since Warner Bros. and several other major Hollywood studios threw their support behind the rival Sony Blu-ray high definition format. DreamWorks, Paramount and Universal are now the only studios with commitments to continue releasing movies in HD DVD. Manufacturers of HD DVD players have been cutting prices in effort to revive demand. Toshiba, for instance, recently reduced the price of its entry level units by 50% to about $150.00 By contrast, Blu-ray players start at about $400.00 or more.
Microsoft’s price cut suggests the company is unlikely to ever introduce a version of the Xbox with an integrated HD DVD player. It was rumored that Microsoft would make such a move at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but the reports proved groundless. As for the Xbox itself, sales have cooled following a brief boost from the introduction of the hit video game Halo 3. Microsoft shipped 4.3 million Xbox 360 systems in the three months ended December 31st, compared to 4.4 million systems during the same period in 2006 — a decline of 2.3%. I guess it’s already late because Blu-Ray currently dominates the market, but every price cut is appreciated. And yeah, this is better than Halo 3!
Source: Informationweek
Comments(43)
there is still hope!
L
L!! “And yeah, this is better than Halo 3!”
i see a future of ps3 being to consel, but the price drop is cool for people with xbox i guess lol
does that guy still go around sayin is this better then halo 3 cause that guy is cool
HD DVD Camp can still win the war; Not by cutting the price but by introducing affordable HD DVD writer drives for PC Desktop users. If any one of the Hi Def camp offers the logical and feasible evolutionary upgrade solution to Combo drives & DVD burners, it will finish the platform war. Be it BD or HD DVD, these days we get it all from the interweb right? What us leecherz actually need is a spacious cheap solution to easily backup the stuff that we DL.
MS should definitely include a hddvd player (or even a bluray) in the xbox360, if they want to still be competitive in the next 3 years against sony, this seems so obvious!
Another huge point is the dvdplayer runs at 12x speed, making way too much noise, an hdplayer would really help there.
Why bundle a HDDVD player if it will be useless down the road. I think Microsoft will just include blu-ray players in their next console. Right now I doubt it is worth their time to build a console with HD/Bluray but eventually they will build it.
I agree @ 4 that is microsofts way forward wither they see it that way remains to be seen.
these drives can be used with a pc with a bit of software, buy the unit get the free disks and relax
you can stream HD movies (mkv / avi / etc) to your xbox using the media center connection.
http://x264.nl/
Can’t see why they’d want to put one in the 360 it will be replaced soon enough so competing against Sony for the next 3 years is irrelevant. I reckon within 3 years we’ll see the next Xbox.
I got all consoles, and prefer the Xbox360 over the others…great games, streams all my downloaded movies to my 1080p 60″ Sony TV with T360 and MyMovies, and has a HD-DVD player.
I like HD-DVD over Blu-ray because it is not region locked. I have HD-DVDs from all over the world, but only import US Blu-rays because that is where I imported my PS3 from. Different movies are at different studios in differend countries, so sometimes they only get released in HD in some other countries. Also, there is no Blu-ray burners, but I have a combo HD-DVD burner/Blu-ray player in my PC. That’s why I like HD-DVD more.
Willy, I couldn’t agree more. For anyone that has used both it’s SOOO obvious which is better. HD DVD has it hands down.
But.. Is this better than Crysis?
Wow.. bunch of xbots huh?
I like HDDVD, but since warner and other companies have left I don’t see the point in buying this addon. Infact, you can get a standalone HDDVD player for $150 from bestbuy that comes with 7 free movies. I’d much rather do that then buying an addon for the xbox360. That way when you get the 3 rings of death at least you can still watch your hddvd movies on your standalone player.
you say “And yeah, this is better than Halo 3!”, but fail to outline your methods to arrive at this conclusion. Could you elaborate, as to say something is better than halo 3 demands more detail.
Where are they getting the price for this????!!!! I can go in to any store in Southern California and buy this noisy thing for $179! I don’t know where they got $260!!! If it’s now $90 I think it might sell out here. No one is buying the PS3 out here.
@6
Why in the world would MS put BR into their 360s when BR is a product of Sony? Can’t see it happening myself. While the odds are stacked against HD DVD, I still wouldnt want to place any firm bets as yet.
Re: Drive Noise – Is this really an issue when listening on 5.1 surround sound???
HDDVD is the superior format, but, alas, it is FINSHED. This latest price cut is nothing more than a push to get rid of the last of the stock of HDDVD players MSoft has kicking around. The format war is over, no matter how much anyone wants to argue it. With Warner dumping HDDVD and Paramount and others ready to do the same, its over. BluRay wins, hands down. Quite the shame at that, seeing as how much awesomer HDDVD’s are.
this would never have happened if all of these companies would not have been greedy and worked together to make a standard from the begining. i don’t really care though because i hate all kinds of disc they are a waste of money and resources because they scratch to easy. just buy yourself a harddrive that you can hook up to the tv or use a dvd player that can play sd cards. cards are were the technology should be going right now they last longer than a disk, but the developers out there need to make cards that can hold 50gigs lol.
HDDVD is gone the my local electronics store are returning the HDDVD players and are getting more Blue Ray players
HD-DVD is far from dead!
So why dont microsoft introduce an external version of the blu-ray?
Thanks but no thanks, I’ll wait for a Blu-ray player for my 360.
I like how people with xbox’s talk about streaming content to their HDTV when the xbox processor isnt capable of streaming or outputting HD formats. The PS3, however, does do it, with no mods or extra software I might add and it came with a BD player like Sony said it would, came with wireless adapter like Sony said it would, and the games are actually on BD like they said it would. Microsoft claimed the 360 would have all that except it would be HDDVD instead of BD, that was their reason for charging higher prices for games….hmmm no HDDVD games, and doesnt even play HDDVD movies without buying something. IF you wanna stream media buy a HTPC not a 360, and yes HDDVD is dead and was dead before it started.
[NUKE] [ .HDDVD. ] [ invalid.format.pwned.by.blu.ray ]
@24
The 360 may not have come with a HD DVD player, but it was a fair bit cheaper than the PS3. It also gave consumers the ability to choose which format they wanted to support.
Incidently, is there really a need for games to be on either BR or HD discs at the moment?
The comment that Microsoft wont release a Blu Ray drive because it is from Sony is a bit daft. Microsoft are not stupid, if Blu Ray really does win (and it looks very, very likely) and Blu Ray becomes the standard for movies via optical disc then of course Microsoft will follow suit. CD was a joint development between Sony and Philips in the 80s and Microsoft support CD audio, CDrom and then CD writers from an early point. Remember Microsoft were members of the DVD+ group but still added native support for the rival DVD- format to Windows eventually. In fact they support DVD-RAM first off.
All this Sony bashing is stupid too, remember HD-DVD is also a one company format, developed and supported by Toshiba. In fact, buy any HD-DVD player, even those from other companies, open it up and you’ll find the basic internals are still from Toshiba.
For goodness sake, be happy with whatever console you bought. Both are great machines with great games and there is room for both.
and Walker, you are correct. This would not have been an issue of all of the companies involved had gotten together and came up with a hybrid format like they did with DVD. Unfortunately it was Toshiba (not Sony) that walked away from that as they did not like the fact that the proposed hybrid format owed more to Blu Ray than it did to their HD-DVD format.
HD-DVD is still way cooler than Blu-Ray.
@4 my burner is already capabale of burning hd dvd’s just need dual layer discs such as memorex brand or etc.
@11
Internal Blu-ray burners have been out for over a year and are constantly dropping in price. HD DVD burners have not. I think they have only just gone on sale if at all. Toshiba only released details of their FIRST HD DVD burner last month.
Here are 2 popular UK sites and they don’t have ANY HD DVD burners.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=10&sortby=nameAsc&subid=314&mfrid=
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.ASP?CatID=12&FilterCategories=439&Thumbnails=yes
For a format that likes to boast how it came out first and how it has a triple layer 51GB disc ready, the fact that you can’t even write to the media for storage purposes is lame, especially seeing how long it has been out.
HD DVD = FAIL
@26
Lets look at PC games. 2 currently games available are bigger than 8.5GB and had to be sold on 2x DVD DL. They are BlackSite Area 51 and John Woo Presents Stranglehold. Both games are around 11GB. Games will get bigger and bigger until Blu-ray is formally adopted in home PC’s. Games will come out on BD soon.
As for console games, developers are finding their limits with DVD DL’s capacity (UT3 – stated by Mark Rein), especially with multi platform games that are being led with the PS3 which is how it should be. Porting a 360 led game to the PS3 leads to bad results (e.g. Madden NFL 08). Porting a PS3 led game to a 360 leads to good results. This has been stated by Epic (with UT3) and EA (with Burnout Paradise). Most developers are now starting to adopt this method and lead development on the PS3 as it’s the most sensible approach.
@28
One of the reasons why Toshiba walked away from the new HD format was because the BDA refused to use M$’s HDi, choosing to go with Sun Microsystems’ JAVA. JAVA won the vote over HDi 10:4. Toshiba weren’t happy with this and took their ball away.
400 dollar blu-ray?
definitely bought one for 250 the other day, and they had a bunch at the store.
Why are you guys still have hopes for HD-DVD – We all know the Blue-ray is far more advance Technology. it using the blue laser to read disce compare to hd still using red laser. in the color spectrum Blue is Thiner than red by comparison hence the same size od disce data can be read in thiner lines that is why blue ray is holding more information. so ijust the matter of advance technologu taking over.heheh
@33 Dude they both use blue lasers.
@33 Here you go, the tech specs. Notice they both use blue laser.
http://www.emedialive.com/articles/readarticle.aspx?articleid=11630#ia
wasn’t it 200 bux before?
The weirdest thing about Blu-Ray is the fact that the cheapest player is STILL the PS3, Blue ray PLUS a free game console.
Also the PS3 “appears” to be upgradeable to v1.1 all the way to v2.0 just with a software download, unlike a lot of the current 1.0 versions out there.
Looking around I can HD taking over the data storage area, but they have to do it quickly, Faster than x1 and they MUST allow the full capacity of the medium (15G-PLEASE, it should be 50!)
If they do that and bite the bullet on prices ($100-$150 for pc burner, $4-5 per disc) then they can salvage the tech and keep it alive and making money (after a while)until the next storage medium comes along (holographic?-compressed flash drives-new tech adds multiples of data storage )
Where are these HD DVD writers that some of you are talking about? I have done a good search and still can’t find any. Can someone post a link? At CES 2007, Toshiba said that they would have internal HD DVD burners in the shops within a month. A year on and I still haven’t seen one for sale.
@37
I doubt HD DVD will take over as a storage medium because it offers much lower space than Blu-ray. HD DVD is currently limited to a maximum of 170GB. The hardware specification cannot read/write beyond this (that’s a 10 layer disc at 17GB per layer). Blu-ray can support 250GB per disc and possibly more. The sooner that HD DVD dies, the sooner that Blu-ray hardware will/media will come down in price.
As for the Blu-ray profiles, you’re correct. The PS3 is the only player on sale at the moment which is fully upgradeable to 2.0 – BD Live. I don’t think that the current Blu-ray stand alone player owners will be any more annoyed than the 1st lot of HD DVD player owners were when Toshiba stated that 1080i was better than 1080p, only to release their 2nd wave of players several months later which could now output to the better 1080p. Many people don’t remember that for some reason.
@26 The 360 was and is cheaper because they left out features they said it would have. and the fact they knew youd be sending it back to be fixed repeatedly. Yes there really is a good reason for games to come on BD(not BR like some here think) just like it was a good reason to put games on cd when the alternative was a floppy disc.
Hmm, HD-DVD is dead, it already was dead when invented.
On HDDVD writer prices for PCs vs BluRay writers…..
They are already selling PCs with BluRay combo writers in them at supermarkets over here for next to nothing… so I guess, it’s too late there also. And what do you do with that copied BluRay game for the PS3?Burn it on a HDDVD?
sorry, but nothing is better than halo 3(and no…not even COD4)
Yes, halo 3 is better than sucking old farts c0cks for breakfast and having excess man’s milk in my mouth. It’s just insane how the price of cemon is going up!
PS3 is sooo Cool. Streaming my divx movies to it. No mods or anything. And it supports the format well. Fast forward/rewind work without a hitch. ANd it upcoverts to 1080p!