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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According to VideoBusiness, Blu-ray Disc set-top players continue to drop in price, and one analyst expects to see at least one $50 USD player on Black Friday.
Last year was dominated by off-brand, cheaper players such as those by Sylvania or Memorex but name brand, Internet-enabled players, most with video streaming from Netflix are becoming to be standard at under $200 USD.
Says Abt Electronics owner Jon Abt: “We are doing better than we initially expected, which is due to the price drops. The price drops were expected, but we didn’t think it would be this deep this quickly. BD Live players [most of which offer streaming movie services] are now available in sub-$200 models.”
Abt also says the company is selling 50 percent more BD units year-on-year.
More notably, NPD Group says 14 percent of all Blu-ray set-top sales this year are for sub-$200 models whereas last year that number was under 1 percent.
A few of the more feature-packed players available right now for under $200 are the Panasonic DMP-BD60 ($150), the Samsung BD-P1600 ($180) and the LG BD370 ($160), all of which offer Netflix, Amazon VOD, CinemaNow or Pandora.
“We’ve seen very strong growth in Blu-ray players this year. It has been a bright spot in a very gloomy industry landscape,” said Ross Rubin, NPD director of industry analysis. “Nearly all other electronics device categories have been down, such as digital cameras and MP3 players.”
As for Black Friday deals on BD players? Rubin says he can see a $50 USD BD player.
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Iowa senator Tom Harkin recently became chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. On Monday, Harkin vowed to look into the possibilities of cancer risks from mobile phone use. He said he was concerned that nobody was able to definitively prove that mobile phones could not cause cancer.
“I’m reminded of this nation’s experience with cigarettes. Decades passed between the first warnings about smoking tobacco and the final definitive conclusion that cigarettes cause lung cancer,” Harkin said. It is estimated that 4 billion people worldwide use mobile phones regularly.
Harkin called a hearing of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, to examine the issue on Monday. “I will pursue this beyond this panel, with the National Institutes of Health,” he said afterward.
However, Harkin should be aware that an enormous amount of research has been conducted already on this issue, and no link has ever been found to prove that mobile phones do cause cancer. Simply saying that nobody has been able to disprove it does not make it more plausible, and it is slightly concerning at least that an elected Senator would pursue something on the grounds that nobody could disprove its existence - but it isn’t surprising.
Of course, there are reports occasionally that do show that there “might” be links in cases, and just recently the Environmental Working Group showed that radio wave emissions vary from one mobile phone brand to the next. Even with this taken into account however, all the research has shown that mobile phones do not emit waves capable of damaging DNA in cells in a human body.
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