Angus Kidman26 February 2007, 10:54 AM
The Australian market's about to get flooded with hi-def DVD players. But where can you get the cheapest movies to play on them?
Let's be honest: whether HD DVD or Blu-ray is your preferred flavour, the market for high definition DVD players isn't yet so huge that the prices for either players or content are likely to drop much.
Last year, a total of around one million players across both formats sold in the US, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
To put that in perspective, Disney sold five million copies of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on DVD in a single day.
Clearly, there's some work to do and, for the moment, a hi-def movie is well and truly a luxury item.
But who says you can't scrabble around and try and get luxury at a discount? (And before someone starts ranting about BitTorrent and muslix64, we're going to stick to legal means here.)
When Blu-ray was officially launched as a format in Australia last week, much was made of the fact that JB Hi-Fi, long a source of discounted stuff on discs, would only be selling Blu-ray titles.
Unfortunately, the current offerings aren't particularly cheap, ranging from $39 to $49 for movie titles.
A search of JB's online store shows that every Blu-ray title in the catalogue is only available on special order. Hold back the crowds!
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Other sites do feature lower prices. JB retails the Adam Sandler flick Click! on Blu-ray for $47.99 (plus $2.75 for postage). EzyDVD has it for $42.83 (plus $1.50 for postage), though, like JB, it didn't have any stock when we dropped in.
HD DVD aficionados have one advantage: the lack of region coding means they can roam freely over the Internet and seek out discounts.
Blu-ray fiends will need to stick to the assigned regions, though the fact that this includes Europe makes it more tempting than DVD's more restrictive (albeit easily sidestepped) system.
Shopping around overseas might not help much.
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Peter Jackson's King Kong, arguably the most prominent HD DVD-exclusive title, costs $39.83 (plus $1.50) from EzyDVD in Australia.
Amazon sells it for $US34.43, including postage, which comes in at somewhere around $43 Australian.
Auctions don't offer much hope either. Activity in the relevant Australian eBay category isn't exactly vibrant -- there were less than 10 listings when we checked it out -- so bargains may be hard to come by.
The fact that both Blu-ray and HD DVD are dumped in the same category means that you should double-check any listed movie carefully.