The Blu Ray player demand skyrocketed, driving prices well past $499, since Toshiba backed out of the formatting war and ended production of the HD-DVD player. Now you may be wondering what's next for the Blu Ray disc.



If you were an early bird buyer, then you have the original prototypical Blu Ray disc 1.0 player. "The earliest Blu-ray player, Profile 1.0, are dinosaurs already," reports The Courant's Kevin Hunt.

There are still a few defiant buyers who refuse to pander to developers and cash-in on the latest technology. They ask, "Why fix something that isn't broken?" For these people, there is still a small niche market for DVD up-converters that can transform traditional DVD recorders into Blu Ray disc capable drives.

The 1.1 Blu Ray disc player quickly followed, featuring "BonusView" picture-in-picture commentary, like the surfing menus on Dish Network, secondary audio-video decoders and 256 MB of local on-disc storage.

"Why stick with DVD's dated video system, based on very lossy MPEG-2 compression, and rely on an upscaler's guesswork at what bits of the image are missing? Get the whole thing for real on Blu ray discs. For those movies you still own on DVD, Blu Ray players upscale too, so you get the best of both worlds."

Some consumers are complaining about paying $40 for a Blu Ray disc, as opposed to the $20 for a regular DVD. To offset the cost of upgrading, many distributors and stores are stepping in to help promote the new Blu Ray disc technology. For instance, Amazon is offering a 2-for-1 Blu Ray discs sale on popular titles like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, 300 and Pan's Labyrinth. Super-saver shipping is free for orders over $25 while supplies last. They are even offering lesser known titles, like The Curse of King Tut's Tomb Miniseries, The Last Sentinel or BBC's Planet Earth Series at an extreme discount of only $10!