"Hey, stop hanging around! You're blocking the doorway!"
That's what shop owners were shouting at teenagers who were loitering outside stores and in malls. The kids were supposedly deterring adult customers - that is, the ones with more spending power.
I remember sitting in a CES press conference sometime in the year $149 D.V.D. listening to Toshiba whine about how no one was making any money selling DVD players any more. But moments later, they were announcing new models with new features and even lower price points. I guess you can't blame them. After all they had a lot of competition back then.
Maybe HD has finally hit the big-time. According to reports around the web, tomorrow consumers will be offered the inestimable opportunity to trample one another at Wal-Mart to buy an HD DVD player on the cheap. How cheap? Really cheap.
Warner currently releases high-def DVDs in both Blu-ray and HD DVD. But the studio may be about to concentrate on Blu-ray only, an executive recently hinted.
Sponsored by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment but involving all the major studio supporters of the Blu-ray format, a so-called "Blu-ray Festival" was held in Hollywood over the past two days (October 29th and 30th).
Recent ruminations over the contents of my rack have given short shrift to a major player. A disc player, in fact--the Integra DPS-10.5. It has long served as the main signal source in my reference system. Occasionally I make a note to that effect in reviews but I've never really done justice to the Integra. Let's remedy that now.