Wal-Mart has unveiled that it will sell a $78 Magnavox Blu-ray player on Black Friday, the cheapest retail price for a BD player this year, undercutting Meijer’s $89 Sylvania Black Friday promotion.
Notably however, neither the Magnavox or the Sylvania models are BD-Live compliant, and will lack Web features such as Netflix-streaming, which is available via Best Buy’s $99 Insignia model, which should be the best deal available if the $20 higher price tag is not a deal breaker.
Wal-Mart will also have $9.99 Blu-ray titles such as The Dark Knight, Wanted, Fast and Furious and all the Harry Potter films. For those who have not moved to HD, standard DVDs will be on sale for $1.99 including movies such as Casino Royale, Hellboy II, I Am Legend, Blood Diamond, Underworld and Spaceballs.
For new releases, Star Trek and G.I. Joe will sell for $8.99, extremely cheap for movies that were released in the last month.
On the gaming front, the company is offering a $299 PS3 bundle that also includes the new games Batman Arkham Asylum and Infamous, as well as Dark Knight on Blu-ray.
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Wal-Mart has begun a new promotional campaign dubbed Operation Main Street in which many products will see huge price cuts for a limited time.
From the full promotion however, Blu-ray products seem to be leading the pack. The Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-ray player is selling for $198 USD, down from $229. The player is Profile 1.1 compatible and will upconvert standard definition DVDs to 1080p.
Potential buyers of the most popular Blu-ray player, the Sony PlayStation 3, should be delighted by the promotion as well. The $399 USD 80GB PS3 will come with a $100 USD Wal-Mart gift card that can be used on any items available at Walmart.com. PlayStation 2 buyers will receive a $30 USD gift card if purchasing the aging $129 USD
Other deals not involving Blu-ray include a 2GB Sony Walkman media player for $49 USD and a 15.4 inch Compaq CQ-139WM notebook for $298 USD.
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Take this with a grain of salt, but according to Blu-ray.com Wal-Mart has begun selling a $298 USD Blu-ray player in select stores, a price over $100 USD lower than current entry-level players.
The site says that the cheaper players are showing up on Wal-Mart store shelves under brand names such as Magnavox and Sylvania but that they are in reality coming from Japanese manufacturer Funai which has been rumored for months to be working on a low-cost Blu-ray player.
Funai is known mainly for manufacturing low cost electronics, which in turn pressures the industry to lower prices for their name brand electronics.
Not much is known about the new players but the site says it supports the Profile 1.1 BD standard.
More information as it becomes available.
