Did you read the article I linked to? $30-40 is way over what Sony has said, according to Cinescape.com:

"The company will wholesale their titles for $17.95. New-release Blu-ray discs will wholesale for $23.45, a premium of 15%-20% over what suppliers were charging for new theatrical DVDs."

heath

We know what they will cost, a few $ more then the current tech, because they are new. Just the same as every other piece of consummer goods on the planet. Is this even relevant? What are we "home entertainment weekly"? Does anyone care that Big Momma 2 is going to be $3.99 more than the regular DVD? Please!

Lets ask something that might actually be relevant to us HDV users! Whats the cost of a burner, and whats the cost of a player and the cost of the BLANK medium?
I have heard that Blue-ray will be higher in $ in all catagories, especially blanks. Anyone know?

The burner at CES was anticipated at 1k or so, and the blanks have already got a set price of around $40.00. They're only useable in XDCAM tho, right now. They're also rewriteable.
Cost of a player *right now*? There isn't one.

Play Station3 will be the first player, and they're anticipated at a retail of $399.00, and consumer set tops showed at CES at a retail of around 1K.

This is considerably less than CD burners cost when they were first released, and still cheaper than DVD burners when they were first released. I'd anticipate we'll see prices drop by year end just as we did with DVD burners.

Any idea of the equivalent HD-DVD prices?

There isn't an "equivalent" because HD-DVD is significantly smaller, but the blank HD-DVD disks are expected to debut around $15.00. I'm sure we'll see those sub 10.00 by year end as well.
At CES, they said around $25.00, but that was before the BluRay retail price announcement on the home movie side of things. Since then, I've been hearing all sorts of price drops on HD DVD. Toshiba is fairly desperate to own the market, and have gotten very aggressive. I'm sure the BD consortium will respond somehow.

Prices will go down faster than DVD-Rs and burners did because of the use. Just the same as HDV will become a common standard faster than DV did.

heath

Are these the discs which come in a cartridge? Are they removable from that cartridge? I wasn't clear on this from anything I've seen so far - will this turn out to be similar to the DVD-RAM/DVD-R situation?

I'm not really looking at Blue-Ray or HD-DVD to deliver content (that's something for the future). Putting WMV-HD (or another flavor of MPEG-4) on a standard DL DVD seems like the most compelling here and now, lost cost solution, at least to me.

Thanks douglas, that's what i was fishing for. The first quote which you directed me back to was about feature films on blu-ray, not about blank (or as I called it, 'storage') media. I wasn't asking a question with an obvious answer, in my defense.

Just want to clear that up. I try to be somewhat thoughtful about my posts, but I appreciate being kept on my toes :-)

I would hope so. Recordable DVD cost a lot when it was introduced, but there was a grand total of one drive available at launch. BD and HD-DVD look to have several models each of drives as well as standalone decks in the pipeline. I know the prices are high to begin with because companies feel the need to recoup R&D costs immediately, but hopefully competition will quickly bring prices down from the stratosphere.

I agree. 8 gigabytes on a < $2 disk will hold a feature film and more. If only there was a dvd like menu system to make it look more like a dvd as far as glossyness.
-Les

I haven't tried it yet, or even read up on it either yet, but supposedly you can create menus with DivX that should work with DivX certified devices.