If you’re shopping for a new Blu-Ray player, you could walk into any big-box or electronics store and pick one up for under $100. For that price, you’ll get a high definition picture and the unit may even include streaming video apps. Or you could go to Walmart, where this 8-year-old player that originally cost $499 is marked all the way down to $200.
Perhaps you don’t know much about audiovisual equipment, and don’t instantly recognize this as a grossly overpriced old model. Let’s go on a tour of contemporary review sites to see what people thought of this gadget during the holiday season of 2007.
The good news, if there is any here, is that this was originally a $500 player when it first hit the market, which a High-Def Digest reviewer referred to as “affordable” back then. CNET cites the retail price as $899, but things were strange in the immediate aftermath of the high-definition DVD format wars of about a decade ago.
That should make a $200 price tag a bargain, except for how it isn’t. That price tag was printed earlier this year, which rules out the possibility that the clearance sticker is old. Mark it down to at most twenty bucks and just let it go, Walmart. Users probably no longer have the patience to burn a disc to update the firmware of a Blu-Ray player that doesn’t connect to the Internet.
Thanks to Craig of the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, who submitted this item with the caption, “Wow. Just wow.”
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist