Best Buy, a large retail chain in the U.S., this week announced trade-in plan under which customers who acquired HD DVD players from one of its stores can bring them back and receive a certain sum for them. While the company claims that the program is in customers’ best interests, in reality the end-users will lose much more than they are going to get. Additionally, Best Buy will provide $50 gift cards to all of its HD DVD customers.

Best Buy will give $50 gift cards to customers who purchased an HD DVD player or Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive from its U.S. stores before February 23, 2008. Customers will get a gift card for each HD DVD device that they purchased. Through this program, Best Buy will distribute more than $10 million in gift cards to customers across the country.

(Full article ‘Best Buy Lets Customers to Get Rid of HD DVD or Receive $50 Gift Cards’)

Despite of the fact that Toshiba Corp. has no plans to develop and manufacture HD DVD hardware after March ’08, the company also has no plans to become part of the Blu-ray disc (BD) Association (BDA) and start making BD players.

Thanks to the fact that HD DVD emerged on the market in its final version, unlike the Blu-ray, it has been adopted by end-users a little slowly, but surely. Thanks to relatively low prices, standalone HD DVD players proved to be comparatively popular among end-users and thanks to good attach rates of movies major HD DVD backers were confident in the future of the format. However, the announcement by Time Warner-owned studios to release new movies exclusively in rivaling Blu-ray disc format caused substantial problems for HD DVD, Toshiba admitted at its press conference in Tokyo, Japan.

“From an objective, fair point of view, we were clearly in a good place until last December and January.

(Full article ‘Toshiba Has No Plans to Make Blu-Ray Players’)

South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc. today introduced an updated version of its high-definition DVD player that supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD, offering a possible solution to the format war.

But at about $1,000, the BH200 “Super Blu Player”, while 16% less than the model LG unveiled in January, still costs twice as much as stand-alone Blu-ray or HD DVD players.

That earlier model shown at the U.S. Consumer Electronics Show was the first to combine Sony Corp.’s Blu-ray standard and Toshiba Corp.’s HD DVD. The goal is to satisfy high-end customers frustrated by the format war that has divided consumers, electronics makers and movie studios and angered retailers.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. is expected to market a dual format player later this year, ahead of the holiday shopping season.

(Full article ‘LG adds features, cuts price on dual HD DVD player’)