Well, the much ballyhooed and long-awaited Onkyo HD DVD player that was shown off at last January's CES has hit the streets... just don't plan on ever buying one (then again, if you read my blog, you almost certainly wouldn't buy one anyway).
Onkyo has released a trickle of their DV-HD805 HD DVD players into the market... and it's a force to be reckoned with. While no one knows exactly how many of these players are making their way to store shelves, one would guess it would be in the millions. Or not. Apparently, 20 players made it to Germany, 11 to Italy, and none to Spain. Those aren't numbers in thousands... those are the actual numbers. And the player is already officially out of production!
Apparently, Onkyo wasn't too pleased with Toshiba's latest pricing moves on HD DVD players, and decided there was no money to be made competing in that market. Most likely, the few players released were to satisfy some contractual obligation to put the player out there. What's even sadder about that is that the Onkyo player was essentially a rebadged Toshiba HD-XE1. So Onkyo couldn't make any money producing HD DVD players that Toshiba designed for them!
For the few dozen new Onkyo HD DVD owners out there, I hope the players use Toshiba firmware, otherwise your players may become paperweights even faster than they were going to otherwise. For everyone else... keep in mind, Toshiba is once again the ONLY major CE company manufacturing HD DVD players. The only question left is how long can they manage to hold out being the only ones in the game?
0 comments:
Post a Comment