Okay, Blu-ray is gorrrrrrrgeous, provided that a shitty transfer doesn't render the final product looking like a Chinese bootleg. But the price of a Blu-ray movie is just too much. Charging a bit more for things like the Planet Earth series I can understand, due to the exceptional quality and amount of content. It's a bit harder to swallow a $30 price tag for the latest hollywood release, though. Even for a movie I like, that's just too much. It would have to be a really good movie to warrant a purchase. Of course the price of media formats comes down with time, but I'd rather not have to wait to pick up a bunch of movies in HD. That's the nature of the beast, though.

What do you guys think?

Wholeheartedly agree and it's one of the reasons I shop exclusively online for my Blu-ray media. Being able to pick up the latest (or old) releases for half off (or in some cases the price of a used DVD) can't be passed up.

What really blows my mind is when old releases, even good ones, are in the $34 range. Why should Terminator 2 be so much? Or Fifth Element? These have been on DVD for years and chances are that they weren't filmed in digital and are 35mm transfers. High quality but still not digital to digital.

Good post! I plan to move into this stuff after I’m done with school, as most of it is time consuming. It’s a great post to reference back to. My blog needs more time to gain in popularity anyway.

Sony doesn't have its priorities right on any front. Console is still too expensive, Blu-ray releases (especially from Sony) are very pricey, ignoring the current global economy all together. Now the PSP Go will be $250, which buys you a repackaged, old technology with a solid state drive (which isn't expensive in bulk).

Some things can't be helped, but Blu-Ray prices can be, much easier than hardware can. Drop the prices sooner or later, lest be crushed by the growing digital distribution market. My friend bought a 360 on the ground that it had Netflix streaming on it. Nobody cares about individual download movies, especially the small collection that Sony has to offer. Even though my friend (despite my warnings that he needed to get a gold account to continue his Netflix streaming (he did and uses it just for that), there simply isn't a convenience there on Sony's side.

I'd buy more Blu-ray movies if the price was better for the films I wanted. Games have priority, but being able to drop the price of the movies will help. If manufacturing costs drop on physical medium's side, games could, potentially, be sold cheaper or be more profitable for development studios to work with. The worst thing about Blu-ray is that not enough studios are taking advantage of the room on the disc. Include more media per disc and it will push consumers to buy it over a download (legal or otherwise).

Of course, if 1080p sets start to come down to a more reasonable price, that would certainly help the movie and game industry a lot more, mostly in Sony's case. I'm still waiting

Blu-rays prompted me to open a Netflix account, and I have to say it's working out pretty well. I hate renting from places like Blockbuster, and I don't want to buy all of my movies again, when I mainly want to see them in HD out of curiosity, and most movies I don't really want to watch over and over again anyway.

I'd download more HD movies from the PlayStation Network, but it's a bit pricey, and I'm running out of hard disk space.

I really need to put in a bigger drive, this 40 gigger filled up fast!

Yeah, I'd be much more inclined to use the PSN to rent stuff if it was as flexible as Netflix or something; basically you rent the thing and it's good for, at the very least, more than just 24 hours from the first second you hit play. Oh, and cheaper. Way too much compared to a new movie.

As for Blu-ray prices, it's all about buying stuff on Amazon. They have sales like every week, some of which are like 50% off. Hopefully prices will continue to come down naturally, though. Blu-rays do look amaaaazing.

I will say that Blockbuster, back when they did games and movies, was a neat setup. Getting a couple of in-store rentals, being able to return stuff you got in the mail to a store or the mail, and some decent prices made it really easy to have a ton of stuff out at once. Sadly, we cancelled it a while back and I'd heard games were pretty much gone, which is a shame.

Honestly, if Sony did SOMETHING like Netflix, I'd be impressed.

Speak of the fucking devil, we got Netflix!

I actually support them rolling out Netflix quickly since it is necessary for them to make a dent in the market this holiday season. After the firmware update adds it to the XMB, it will obviously be a better feature.

I hope running the disc all the time doesn't kill my BD drive...