lordjedi said:
Jay: I really don't care how much different you think a hardware vs software player is. Beyond the necessary chips to decode the Blu-ray content, the differences aren't major. DVD players have hardware mpeg2 decoders. PC DVD drives don't because the software does the decoding. It's pretty much the same thing with Blu-ray.

I know I said I wasn't coming back, but your stubbornness on this point and your inability to accept and process new information borders on autistic.

BD computer drives are completely different from standalone decks because your PC is there to do the rest of the work. Your PC provides the software decoder application (and all the licensing fees that entails), the hardware to run it on (CPU, RAM, video card with DVI or HDMI), a power supply, and a fancy GUI.

These are all things that must be built into a standalone deck, and that's not including other hardware like the IR receiver for the remote, the remote itself, etc. We're not talking about a DVD player here either because the processing power required for smooth 1080p playback/fast forward/rewind is much higher than 480p.

This is why Toshiba sold the first HD-DVD players at a huge loss; they basically crammed a PC into a standalone form factor.

Have improved engineering and parts consolidation led to lower manufacturing costs? Yes. Have costs gotten low enough to provide a decent profit margin when selling a deck at $200? I highly doubt it.

You may not have been trying to assert that standalone decks should be cheap because BD drives are cheap, but you were trying to tie discounts on BD drives into discounts on standalones; one has nothing to do with the other. You might as well compare holiday discounts on toasters and microwaves because they both heat up food.