PriceSCAN Blog

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Flat-Screen Prices Still, Well, Flat; Some Even Rise

Electronics | Mar 6, 08

Late in January I observed that some popular flat-screen televisions had risen in price in the post-holiday, pre-SuperBowl period, and this trend seems to be continuing.
Then as now, the most popular plasma television on this site was the 50 inch Panasonic TH-50PZ700U. As can be seen from the graph below, February and the start of March have brought little change to the average and lowest offered price for this set.

Time Period: 4/16/2007 through 3/3/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

It's a similar story for the then-most popular LCD set on PriceSCAN (now the second-most sought-after on our site), the 52 inch Samsung LN-T5271F, whose average price has actually gone up over the last two weeks.
Time Period: 9/3/2007 through 3/3/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

It's worth noting that the current most popular LCD television on PriceSCAN, Sony's KDL-52XBR4 52 inch BRAVIA XBR High Definition LCD WEGA, has dropped appreciably in price over the last two months (perhaps helping to account for its rise in relative popularity), though it has recently shown signs of stabilizing.
Flat-screen price firming is borne out in the behavior of the PriceSCAN LCD and Plasma indices. Interestingly, in the case the 50-inch plasma indices, the 720p sets have appreciated sharply relative to 1080p televisions, perhaps indicating that the former fell too far, too fast relative to the higher-definition later.
Five weeks ago I speculated that January's flat screen price hikes/stabilization might have been influenced by the then-upcoming SuperBowl, and this might indeed have been the case. Yet the persistence of these phenomena suggests other factors may be at work, including perhaps next year's switch to digital transmission and, more ominously, the looming shadow of inflation, now beginning to spread to portions of the technology sector.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Blu-ray Boosts Inflation As HD-DVD Dies

Electronics | Feb 29, 08

The demise of Toshiba's HD-DVD standard seems to have precipitated a rise in the price of competing Blu-ray players, reminding us that tech prices go up as well as down.
To recap, as anticipated here ("Will Blu-ray Vanquish HD-DVD, And Will Anybody Care?"), the repeated defection of major studios from the HD-DVD camp allowed Sony's Blu-ray high-def format to garner the critical mass necessary to vanquish its rival. This triumph was ratified by Wal-Mart's decision to stop selling HD-DVD devices, prompting Toshiba to throw in the towel earlier this month and discontinue further HD-DVD development.
Leaving aside the question of whether downloads and streaming video will render Sony's victory Pyrrhic in nature, it's interesting to observe the aftermath of the firm's conflict with Toshiba in terms of the pricing of their respective products. As seen in the graph below, as it became increasingly clear to the market that Blu-ray would likely be the winning standard, the lowest merchant price of the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray Player, the most popular model on PriceSCAN.com using this high-def standard, actually rose by some 27% percent over the last seven weeks, with the average price rose by over 16%.

Time Period: 6/4/2007 through 2/25/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

You can also see evidence of this effect in the 9% year-to-date rally of the PriceSCAN Blu-ray index.
By contrast, the lowest offered price of Toshiba’s HD-A3 HD-DVD player on this site has fallen over 55% during the last seven weeks, and the average price is off over 45% - see graph below.
Time Period: 9/24/2007 through 2/25/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

The overall PriceSCAN HD-DVD index is off over 38% this year, and in light of Toshiba's decision, a nose dive seems likely as these players join LaserDisc and Betamax on the boulevard of broken video dreams.
The graphs above remind us that the market for tech good goes two ways, both up and down. We've been conditioned to expect only the later type of price action through long periods of innovation and increasing efficiency of production. But the laws of supply and demand are not suspended just because a product contains a microchip. Here we see the power of a pile-on of content providers and vendors to pick out and crystallize a given technological standard (a la the "increasing returns to scale" lock-in theory of W. Brian Arthur) and bolster demand for that technology. Blu-ray's price rise is all the more remarkable in that it is taking place in the context of a slowing economy, when demand for non-essential "luxury" items might be expected to slacken, and that this rally reverses some of the price decline Blu-ray shared with HD-DVD late last year - see "Blu-ray, HD-DVD Prices Falling Like A Gentle Winter Snow (And In High-Def You Can Really See Those Flakes!)."
Then again, as the Fed is rediscovering to its chagrin, prices can go up even as an economy weakens; those raw material prices can be such a pest, no? And while the increased price of Blu-ray is just a drop in the stagflationary bucket, it does demonstrate that more than oil, copper and corn can help drive prices up.
As for early adopters, the Blu-ray contingent can congratulate themselves on saving some money by buying early, while heartbroken HD-DVD loyalists can console themselves with the hope that someday their players might trade as collector's items.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Air Not There

Computers | Feb 11, 08

Failing to find her childhood home on returning to Oakland, Gertrude Stein remarked "There is no 'there' there", and perhaps I'm just as lost given my difficulty locating the "there" in the new MacBook Air.
After all, commentators as esteemed as the Times' David Pogue and the Journal's Walter S. Mossberg have described handling the three-pound, 3/4" thick aluminum laptop as so satisfying a sensory experience that I was reminded of Woody Allen fondling that futuristic joy-inducing silver orb in his film "Sleeper". And in addition to such Apple coolness, the MacBook Air does feature a 13.3 inch screen, large for an ultralight notebook.
But for eighteen hundred bucks the Air delivers a relatively small 80 GB hard drive and just one USB port (the only other external connections are for headphones and an external monitor, so perhaps "Air" could be said to stand for air-gap). You can buy an external USB hub or Ethernet connection, but externals kind of defeat the point of the Air's almost hermetically-sealed elegance. And sealed is the operative word, as the battery is not meant to be removed by the user, and thus cannot be swapped for a spare on the road. When the battery dies, you'll have to pay Cupertino to replace it for you. No CD/DVD drive makes backing up data or loading programs from those media an issue, and of course without carrying an external drive you won't be playing DVD movies at 18,000 feet.
Apple offers solutions to these issues that are, well, quintessentially Apple. Download those movies from the company's store via Wi-Fi (which the Air does have) and if you need to get a tune out of the Air, dump it on an iPod. If you really must install software from a CD or DVD, the Air is sold with Remote Disk, a program which allows the machine to wirelessly access another Mac or PC's CD/DVD drive and use it as an external peripheral.
It's worth noting that Apple is offering a more advanced model with a feature road warriors may appreciate: a flash memory-based 64 GB solid state drive whose lack of a spinning disk may increase durability However, this version (with a 1.8 GHz CPU as opposed to the standard 1.6 GHz model) will run you a rather steep $3,100.
So perhaps it's just me, but all this seems like a fairly expensive way to eschew basic features of power management, data back-up, media/program access and connectivity which I find very useful when traveling. Maybe the Air can work on short trips for those with relatively light computing needs, a high degree of comfort with Apple-dependence (just to change the battery?) and/or a willingness to rely on another computer as the mother-ship. Sure, respectable people may touch this machine with a degree of ardor that borders on the obscene, but for now, I'll continue to insist on the ability to put disks in my laptop - and to be able to take the battery out, all by myself. Like Woody in Sleeper, I think that, no matter the tactile appeal of a machine, there are some things human beings should be able to do for themselves.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (5)

Is The Super Bowl Bolstering Post-Holiday Flat-Screen Prices?

Electronics | Jan 28, 08

Football, that thinking man's alternative to Ultimate Fighting, may be helping to support LCD and plasma television pricing.
In the wake of the holiday shopping season, we've seen considerable analyst speculation that a slowing economy would bring lower flat-screen sales growth and hence a drop in prices. However, in January the prices of many televisions seem to have stabilized ahead of our national celebration of large men colliding with one another. Consider the PriceTrend graphs (below) for the most popular LCD and plasma sets on this site, those being the 52 inch Samsung LN-T5271F and the 50 inch Panasonic TH-50PZ700U, respectively.
Samsung LN-T5271F
Time Period: 9/3/2007 through 1/21/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

Panasonic TH-50PZ700U
Time Period: 4/16/2007 through 1/21/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

Each moderated its price descent and even appreciated as we moved through the holidays and approached the Super Bowl, and I can't help but wonder if this has something to do with a last minute scramble to equip television rooms with the latest technology prior to the game. This price stabilization has been fairly widespread among flat screen models and manufacturers, as can be seen by examining our composite PriceSCAN LCD and Plasma indices.
Of course, reductions in flat-screen production (especially LCDs) may also be helping to support prices from the supply side. But perhaps, even in the face of looming recession, the American consumer is simply loathe to give up his or her high-definition dreams, especially when they involve watching this country's version of human chess (Hey, the average NFL defensive back is still far more intelligent and articulate then most plastic rooks. So long, Bobby Fisher.) It will be interesting to see if we experience a return to softening prices following this coming Sunday. In the meantime, just be glad science has allowed us to watch these modern gladiators spit out a mouthful of Gatorade in stunning 1080p resolution.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Will Blu-ray Vanquish HD-DVD, And Will Anybody Care?

Electronics | Jan 10, 08

Even as Hollywood studios line up behind Sony's high-def standard, emerging high-speed movie downloads and streaming on-demand content may render Blu-ray a technology whose time never came.
Last Friday, Time Warner announced that by May it would drop Toshiba's HD-DVD format and make its high-def content available exclusively on Blu-ray. This means that of the seven major studios, only two remain committed to HD-DVD, those being Viacom's Paramount and General Electric's Universal. With Blu-ray movie sales running at twice HD-DVD's rate last year, the Warner Bros. decision may well be the tipping point that drives a lock-in effect in favor of Sony. This should constitute sweet revenge for the firm whose Betamax standard lost out to JVC's VHS in the videotape wars of the 1980's.
Yet this time around there's a fly in the ointment. I noted back in March of 2006 that as consumers grow increasingly comfortable with online movie downloads and the video on demand services of cable companies, the rationale for high-def disk-based movie sales begins to crumble ("Blu-ray Vs. HD-DVD: Lock-In, Co-Existence, Or Irrelevance?"). Sony's Blu-ray sales have been heavily driven by its inclusion in Playstation 3 consoles, a move which helped put these units at a price disadvantage relative to Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Wii, quite possibly costing the firm videogame market share. Blu-ray's higher price point may prove prohibitive for consumers considering a stand-alone purchase (perhaps allowing HD-DVD to stick around a bit longer that it otherwise would), yet without a higher price Sony may have difficulty recouping its investment, especially if one factors in lower PS3 sales.
Meanwhile, Comcast and others are announcing plans to radically expand the number of on-demand and download titles, while cutting download times from hours to minutes. If this turns out to be true (and with superior bandwidth and compression technology I see no reason why it won't) you have to wonder whether most consumers will chose to shell out hundreds of dollars for Blu-ray. In the wake of the Warner announcement we've actually seen some merchants raise the price of key Blu-ray players – note the increase in the average price of the Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-ray Player, for example.

Time Period: 9/3/2007 through 1/7/2008
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

With high-def downloads and VOD breathing down its neck, perhaps Blu-ray manufacturers will have to make these players a more compelling value proposition, lest Sony and its allies find themselves having won themselves sole possession of a high-def technological rout.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Blu-ray, HD-DVD Prices Falling Like A Gentle Winter Snow (And In High-Def You Can Really See Those Flakes!)

Electronics | Dec 19, 07

Some early tech-fan enthusiasm for Blu-ray and HD-DVD was of the sort normally reserved for James Lipton's commentaries on the brilliance of filmmakers behind the likes of, say, "Beerfest."
However, the somewhat tepid response of consumers has motivated repeated rounds of price cuts, and Sony's inclusion of a Blu-ray player in the $399 40 GB PlayStation 3 may have, as predicted, introduced further downward price pressure (see "But Blu-ray's An Amazing Technology….OK, What If We Cut The Price, Let You Pretend To Shoot People And Throw In Spiderman 3?"). Now, in the home stretch of the holiday shopping season, introductory-level high-def players are available for less than the price of some iPods.
Consider the Samsung BD-P1400, the top Blu-ray player on PriceSCAN by popularity. Since the Blu-ray bearing PS 3's October introduction, this model has fallen from at least $400 to well under $300, a discount of over 25% to the Playstation 3 (after all, the Samsung doesn't play games).

Time Period: 9/3/2007 through 12/10/2007
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

With Toshiba's HD-DVD standard perhaps feeling the heat from Blu-ray, HD-DVD players are going for even less. The Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player has fallen from $300 to under $215 in the last six weeks.

Time Period: 9/24/2007 through 12/10/2007
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price

Then again, in the holiday spirit of peace, perhaps you'd like a player that can handle both high-def standards. Both the LG Electronics BH-200 Super Blu Player and the Samsung BD-UP5000 Blu-ray / HD-DVD Combo are being offered by well-known vendors for less than $800. But check availability, as, like peace itself , neither may be immediately obtained.
Oh, and as for Mr. Lipton, he's got a new book out called "Inside Inside", in which you can read about his life and interview subjects, each of the later being more gifted and talented than the last.

Posted by jeffrey.trester
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)