Bob Caswell - Latest Comments in Amazon’s Attempt at Helping Its HD DVD Customers

Re: Amazon’s Attempt at Helping Its HD DVD Customers

Paul Ellis — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:03:13 -0000

That's the big problem with Blu-ray. Hopefully they stop making changes to the spec at BD-Live/Profile 2.0 so eventually this discussion will go away. It is like Blu-ray wasn't designed for the average consumer. Can you imagine being an average consumer buying an HD-DVD player only to have Blu-ray win, to then buying a Blu-ray player where most of the special features on new discs didn't work because it wasn't BD-Live?

That is why I was an HD-DVD fan, it's spec was done; all players could run (not just play the main movie) all discs. So this Samsung player actually supports more advanced features for HD-DVD (it specifically cites HDi support) than it does for Blu-ray. Try explaining that to Joe Consumer.

Re: Amazon’s Attempt at Helping Its HD DVD Customers

bobcaswell — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:56:06 -0000

Wow, Paul, I didn't even think about those issues when I originally wrote this. The fact that it's going to be discontinued in two months and may be incompatible in certain ways...

And Amazon acts like they'd be doing me a favor and not the other way around. Why couldn't they just call it a liquidation event or something?

Re: Amazon’s Attempt at Helping Its HD DVD Customers

Paul Ellis — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:48:26 -0000

I love how they are trying to do you a favor by off-loading another dud (the BD-UP5000 hasn't been selling well and is scheduled to be discontinued in May) HD movie player on their "valued" customers. I can't think of a reason why someone would want to buy a player that isn't BD-Live (aka Profile 2.0) right now. Of course Amazon and Samsung never say what profile this player is. I had to search elsewhere on the web to find out what profile it really is, and the best I could tell is that there is supposed to be a firmware upgrade to Profile 1.1 that came out in January but Samsung's release notes for their firmware never mention it. It could be a lowly 1.0 profile player.