Pricewatch - Over the past month we have been reporting on the pricing trend of Blu-ray Dusc players.  As HD DVD faded away, prices of BD devices began to slowly creep up, to where they have now largely rested at around $400.

This week we decided to take a look at how changes in price have changed the demand of the products, and found that while consumers have been stepping up to buy players for around $350, many appear to be deterred from spending much more than that.



This chart shows the average prices of four major Blu-ray players as well as the top-selling Blu-ray/HD DVD combo player since the beginning of this year, according to e-tailer data from Pricegrabber.

It is clear that in every instance, players are more expensive now than they were when HD DVD was still a contender in the high-def disc market.  After all, price leadership was the only thing HD DVD had going for it at the time, and Blu-ray manufacturers and some retailers were aggressively trying to nullify that point by bringing down BD prices.



Sony's BDP-S300, Sharp's BD-HP20U and Panasonic's DMP-BD30K are all at or around new price highs for 2008.  For a while, LG's BH200 combo player was dropping in price, but over the past week it has climbed back up.

The overall increase in Blu-ray prices is something we've been watching for a while now, and one question we had was whether this would be a burden on the chosen HD format or if it would cause the early Blu-ray victory to crumble.

We decided to look at total sales of the two top-selling standalone Blu-ray players, the Sony BDP-S300 and the Samsung BD-P1400, and look at how many units have been sold at various price levels.



This chart shows data for the Sony BDP-S300 player.  The line represents a cumulative amount of the number of players demanded through different price points.  For example, at the low end of the scale, purchases of the S300 when it was priced at around $310 make up around 2% of all sales of the device.

The total quantity demanded increases cumulatively as the price increases on the x-axis.  Each tick mark represents an increase of $10, so sales of the S300 when it was priced at between $310 and $330 accounted for around 7% of all sales.  Between $310 and $360 accounted for around 30% of all sales.

Read on the next page: Little activity above $400