Comments on: Amazon’s Attempt at Helping Its HD DVD Customers

By: Amazon Giving $50 Credit to Its HD DVD Buyers | TechConsumer

Amazon Giving $50 Credit to Its HD DVD Buyers | TechConsumer — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:00:48 +0000

[...] Today, to my surprise, I received the email below. This is much better than the company’s first attempt at treating me as a “valued HD DVD customer” and comes after Best Buy made a similar [...]

By: CrunchDeals? Get two free HD DVDs when you buy a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo player and | official tech news

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:17:37 +0000

[...] reserve judgment but TechConsumer’s Bob Caswell states, “Gee, thanks, [...]

By: CrunchGear » Archive » CrunchDeals? Get two free HD DVDs when you buy a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo player and two Blu-ray discs

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:48:53 +0000

[...] reserve judgment but TechConsumer’s Bob Caswell says, “Gee, thanks, [...]

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:03:13 +0000

That’s the big problem with Blu-ray. Hopefully they stop making changes to the spec at BD-Live/Profile 2.0 so eventually this discussion will go away. It is like Blu-ray wasn’t designed for the average consumer. Can you imagine being an average consumer buying an HD-DVD player only to have Blu-ray win, to then buying a Blu-ray player where most of the special features on new discs didn’t work because it wasn’t BD-Live?

That is why I was an HD-DVD fan, it’s spec was done; all players could run (not just play the main movie) all discs. So this Samsung player actually supports more advanced features for HD-DVD (it specifically cites HDi support) than it does for Blu-ray. Try explaining that to Joe Consumer.

By: Bob Caswell

Bob Caswell — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:56:06 +0000

Wow, Paul, I didn’t even think about those issues when I originally wrote this. The fact that it’s going to be discontinued in two months and may be incompatible in certain ways…

And Amazon acts like they’d be doing me a favor and not the other way around. Why couldn’t they just call it a liquidation event or something?

By: Paul Ellis

Paul Ellis — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:48:26 +0000

I love how they are trying to do you a favor by off-loading another dud (the BD-UP5000 hasn’t been selling well and is scheduled to be discontinued in May) HD movie player on their “valued” customers. I can’t think of a reason why someone would want to buy a player that isn’t BD-Live (aka Profile 2.0) right now. Of course Amazon and Samsung never say what profile this player is. I had to search elsewhere on the web to find out what profile it really is, and the best I could tell is that there is supposed to be a firmware upgrade to Profile 1.1 that came out in January but Samsung’s release notes for their firmware never mention it. It could be a lowly 1.0 profile player.