Blu-ray is Penetrating the Market

By Marcus Yam
published

The Blu-ray Disc Association was proud to announce its successes in growth throughout 2008. With the growing number of HDTV sets in homes, it’s only natural that consumers are looking for content to drive all those new pixels.

Blu-ray Disc promotions group chairman Andy Parsons cited DisplaySearch numbers, claiming that 10.7 million players have sold since the launch of the format. Parsons added that this number doubles DVD’s progress at the same point in the format’s life.

“A lot of people think of DVD as an overnight success, but actually if you look back, we have some data from CEA market research that shows three years into the launch of DVD 5.4 million players had shipped into the U.S. market. So if you are comparing DVD to Blu-ray we are actually looking at a considerably larger number of players that have shipped in only 2.5 years into the life of Blu-ray, so we are doing quite well.”

Of course, the 10.7 million figure includes PlayStation 3 consoles, which is still the Blu-ray player most consumers own. With prices on stand-alone machines dropping as low as $99, however, expect the scales to tip the other way throughout 2009.

Overall, 2008 saw three times as many Blu-ray Disc players sold when compared against 2007.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • malveaux
    Lol. First.

    Clearly, so many people care about Bluray. The unfortunate thing is that if you watch a Bluray from 15 feet away, you're not going to see much difference compared to a normal DVD. Bluray is higher quality, for sure, but only at closer distances can the eye actually use that higher res. It's nice for LARGER screen size TVs. It's still not there yet, at least, not for the cost.
    Reply
  • sacre
    I have a 7.2 flagship sound system, a 96 inch Screen using a Benq W5000 1080P DLP projector and you know what..

    All my HD DVD's have better image quality then the Blu-ray.. why is this? not sure why. I bought a high quality 150 dollar HDMI cable from thesource for this Blu-ray player and still, image isn't as sharp as the HD-DVD.

    When you have a 96 inch screen at 1080p/24 and can look at the fine details, HD-DVD was better in terms of quality. Too bad they didn't make it.
    Reply
  • I would check your player, I have ripped both bluray and HD-DVD titles and in nearly every case where the film was released in both formats the image quality is *identical* some early BD releases using the MPEG2 codec were awful, but the new releases use the exact same compression as HD-DVD, so I reckon your BD player has issues or isn't setup correctly. Make sure you projector is set to 1:1 mapping as well.
    Reply
  • dieseldre2k
    Bluray was obviously going to penetrate the market eventually. the question was more of "when?" rather than "will it?" so therefore this is not news.

    the 2 things holding it back were price and HD-DVD competition. the latter is gone, so now its just a matter of how fast the price can drop on Bluray.
    Reply
  • chookman
    sacreI have a 7.2 flagship sound system.
    I bought a high quality 150 dollar HDMI cable from thesource for this Blu-ray player and still.
    What is a "Flagship sound system" any who? You show me some content in 7.1 or 7.2 from what i know the majority of content (including BD) is all 5.1...

    Did the salesman tell you to buy a HDMI cable worth $150? You got ripped off HDMI signals are in digtal so you will either get a signal or you wont its not like analogue connections/cables that can be plagued with interference.

    I agree with malveaux. And the fact that those numbers are inflated by PS3 sales would mean a drop so the comparison of DVD or even less.
    Reply
  • jtsx1
    I'm sure there are others out there like myself who primarily bought the PS3 for its blu ray capabilities and gaming secondary. Those numbers are probably a bit inaccurate, but probably not as much as some of you think.

    As for HDMI, I went with aapl's brand and don't have any problems with quality so far. My view distance is around 13' and is a noticeable improvement over reg. DVD. I would imagine blu ray will get even better, especially since its competition is dead.
    Reply
  • Tekkamanraiden
    Well they are finally getting so real HD content so its not all that surprising. I'm still not going to bother until Lord of the Rings is released. I want to see if recording it in HD was worth it.
    Reply
  • TheViper
    10.7 million Blu-ray players in the US. Just over 7 million are accounted for via PS3. So less than 4 million stand alone Blu-ray players.

    That's compared to 5.4 million DVD players that didn't have a trojan horse gaming console in the same time period.

    Is that really brag worthy? Sure, I guess if you just look at the numbers but numbers without context tell no tales.
    Reply
  • Blessedman
    Sure it is, alot of people look at it from the perspective of having a blu-ray play with a built in game console/media server. I think the ps3 is the best blu-ray player out there, and I mostly use it for blu-ray and being a media port. At the time it was either buy a 399$ ps3 or a 399$ stand-alone player. Only a moron wouldn't take the ps3. Not to mention it is still one of the fastest players on the market.
    Reply
  • mdillenbeck
    I read an article a few months back that rated the PS3 as the #1 BD player on the market by far - so I am sure there are many people who said "for $100, I might as well add a game console to my BD player".

    I also wonder if these numbers count people like me who bought a BD burner for my computer and use it also as my player.

    As for the HD difference - I have a little old 42" LCD HDTV that I use at about a 6.5' distance from couch to screen. I can tell you HD TV channels AND BDs have a significant quality difference. Sure, if I take my glasses off, my DVD and BD of Bladerunner may look the same - but with my poorly corrected vision I can easily see a huge difference in image quality. Sorry, I just don't believe people who say "there really is no difference" - maybe for you, but my experience tells me otherwise. (Then again, I've never detected a difference between 5.1 and 7.1 sound systems - but my hearing sucks also. Heck, getting old just sucks.)
    Reply