Sony teasingly revealed today that its first dedicated set-top Blu-ray Disc player to reach the UK and the rest of Europe will be arriving some time in the summer.
The UK street price will be between £300 and £350 more than in the USA - and buying direct from Sony UK at RRP (£900) will result in you paying £450 over the top!
Find out more, then share your thoughts here on the product, the technology and the pricing.
Cool i can buy 3.
cough ripoffbritain cough cough....
Cheers, David
Three things:
1) Why is it so big when the drive it self is about half the height of it.
2)The design team must be colour blind and see the hideous blue strip as a grey/black colour. If it were darker I wouldn't say so much but its almost like their saying "Over here this is a blue (see the stripe) ray player".
3) The price of it to me tells me that sony are saying "Go buy a PS3 if you want blueray". £900 is laughable.
The only way rip off Britain will become value for money Britain is if we all refuse to pay for more expensive items and just ignore them. Yet as a nation we are stupid enough to accept being ripped off through pure ignorance for the price of things else where and we end up getting screwed time after time after time.
My mate is working with blue ray and HD DVD, hes involved in designing chips for video mixing desks. One of the units hes playing with appears to be made out of computer components, rather than being a full custom design. Will try and find out which one it is, think he mentioned that it was rather large.
Bob, your articles on how we're being ripped off are starting to depress me... at least keep them down to one a week!
What can we do to stop this? Not buying stuff isn't really an option, for we are a materialistic people.
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Steve,Originally Posted by Steve
You're depressed?
But what can I do?
There's been a whole lot of new product announcements on the run where the prices in the UK are way more than in the USA.
I've got two choices:
* Ignore the products for a week or so (not practical, of course)
* Pretend I don't know how much dearer they are here than in the USA (not honest, of course)
It's probably about time that HEXUS made as big a splash as possible and maybe tried to get some sort of serious fair-pricing push under way, at least in consumer electronics and software, which to me are where the most blatant rip-offs are happening.
What does everyone think?
With a tear of sadness in my eye, I agree.
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Hear, hear.
sounds like a good idea
Iain M
"Sleep All Day, Party All Night
Never Grow Old, And Never Die"
with a low feral growl in my throat, I also agree. Let's tell those budders we ain't going to stand for it any more !
I certainly won't be buying anything of that price differential anytime soon.
Cheers, David
this sounds like a job for an online petition!!!!
Vodka
The more people that pile in here to endorse this idea, the happier I'll feel.
However, I do feel sufficiently stongly about this to guarantee that I will put the whole idea onto the editorial agenda at HEXUS - hopefully with Steve's backing and the backing of a good number of others; I know that quite a few others are no less hacked off than I am.
I'm largely thinking out loud now, but I think that my recommendation would likely be that we to run an integrated high-profile campaign across all channels:
HEXUS.net
HEXUS.gaming
HEXUS.lifestyle
and, of course,
HEXUS.tv.
And, if practical, I'd also like to see this run on our two main associate sites:
Beyond3D
and
ESReality
I also think that we might need to commit to doing this for a certain period of time - but worry that the reaction from the industry, if it knew this, would be simply to batten down the hatches for that period of time (or am I exaggerating our importance?).
What I'm more sure about is that HEXUS.tv could supply a very significant way of airing this whole matter.
That said, producing videos is an extremely expensive business and we might not necessarily be able to afford to do as much as we'd like to do or our visitors would like us to do.
But, assuming we can use HEXUS.tv, it would be useful, me thinks, for us to identify all of the big-name companies that are shown as having excessive differentials between the price of their goods here and in the USA and try to sit them down in front of the cameras to answer our questions - and those of our site visitors.
I know it might be fun and headline-grabbing if all we do is point the spotlight on individual companies (and I'm not saying we shouldn't do that) but what may turn out to be more interesting still - and a lot more worthwhile in the long run - is to first host, chair and film a series of round-table discussions.
I say that because, in my experience, round-tables ease the pressure on individual speakers (and their companies), while also generating more in-depth discussions and a greater degree of honesty than ever seems possible with a straight one-to-one Q&A format.
There are, contrary to what many of us may think, some significant differences between the US and UK markets in additional to the absence in the USA of a standard, country-wide sales-tax system akin to VAT.
It's my belief, for instance, that a good number of UK retailers expect to be given higher margins and more preferential (and thus, more costly) terms than their counterparts in the USA.
At any rate, that was a story that I was regularly told by manufacturers over the many years during which I wrote about electrical retailing.
That sort of situation can distort the whole market if such retailers are regarded by manufacturers and distributors as being especially important to winning the hearts and minds of consumers (or, at least, getting product in front of them).
I guess no one will be surprised if I say that I suspect that the one UK firm most likely to fit that bill is the Dixons Store Group - though I don't for a moment think it the only candidate.
Even so, I'd hope and expect that we'd give everyone a fair crack of the whip and not, for instance, pillory DSG for the wrong reasons - such as how dire many of you feel their shop-store staff are in terms of product knowledge and general sales skills.
But, maybe, there are other, quite different, significant factors that explain why it might be reasonable for some prices to be considerably more in the UK than the USA.
In saying that, though, I think that companies are going to struggle to convince me or anyone else that transport costs or translation costs could possibly justify significantly higher UK pricing.
However, I'm sufficiently open-minded to allow the existence of mitigating factors and think that if we are going to do more than thump a tub and shout and scream (which, generally, tends not to make a great deal of difference in the grand scheme of things), the very least we need to do is give companies a fair chance to explain themselves.
Their explanations might turn out to be worthy of consideration and actually show that they are not acting unreasonably.
Alternatively, they might simply demonstrate that pricing differentials are indefensible.
Oh, and as a final (but not terribly original) out-loud thought, I guess that what we will require, if we do push ahead with a campaign, is a dedicated forum area where we can channel people's feeling, gather together the facts about pricing differentials and just generally keep folk informed of developments.
And, after all that whittering, I reckon I should shut up now!
2 things guarantee people will watch sex and controversy, and well nick aint my type at all
I'm in agreement with a campaign against the horribly inlfated prices we always pay over here.
Ditto
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