When I Will Go Blu

It may not be official yet, but it might as well be based on all the recent reports of Toshiba about to drop its HD DVD format. The irony of all of this was that I finally received my five free HD DVD movies just this week. It took the entire 10 weeks to ship but at least I got them. I sure hope Toshiba will still honor the offer for everybody that submitted their form even at this late stage of the game(I saw a guy buy a Toshiba HD DVD player at BestBuy just this past Monday).

Anyways I digress. This blog is about why I haven't bought a Blu-ray player yet. The simple answer is that there isn't currently one on the market that supports all the features I want for a reasonable price. I'm looking for a player that is profile 2.0 (or 1.1 upgradeable to 2.0), decodes both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio internally as well as output the bitstream to a compatible receiver and has analog audio outputs (5.1 or 7.1) for under $400.

The closest player that comes to my dream machine would be the Sony PlayStation 3, however it doesn't have analog audio outputs so I would have to purchase a new HDMI audio receiver in order to take advantage of Dolby TrueHD. It also lacks support for decoding DTS-HD Master Audio inside the player and it won't pass the bitstream so I couldn't listen to any BD movie with DTS-HD Master Audio. Krudd also warned me not to purchase a PS3 just for playing BD titles which I have to agree with. I already have two game consoles (Xbox 360 and Wii) and don't need a third. Who am I, Leo Laporte?

Looking at the idoblu.co.uk Blu-ray player website, you can see a few models that will support the features I'm looking for, but neither one seems to be out on the market yet. What's worse is that I can't seem to find one that is near my price point. I bought a second generation Sony DVD player back in the day and it cost me about $500. After seeing the player prices drop dramatically over the next few years, I told myself I wouldn't ever pay that kind of price for a single purpose media player again.

In addition, I've heard complaints from early adopters that their Blu-ray players had various issues like slow load times (1-3 minutes from inserting the BD movie to the time it actual plays were common), constant need for firmware updates to play new BD titles, and the fact they couldn't play a simple audio CD. Call me crazy, but I want my next generation format to be just as good as the "older" DVD format its intended to replace.

Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 (now called Bonus View) is important to me, not because I think I'm going to use it much but because the same functionality was present on my HD DVD player and I don't want to consider taking a step back by going Blu. Besides according to the BDA, us early adopters should know what we are getting in to before purchasing. :-) In conclusion, it's rumored the new Bonus View players should be out by May. Hopefully this turns out to be true since there are quite a few BD titles I would love to own as well as rent via NetFlix.