At the moment DVD burners are a commodity and very cheap, nearly everyone, certainly in the 'western world' is able to purchase one. However Blu-ray and HD-DVD burners and players are very expensive, or you'll have to buy a console which you already wanted anyway.

At what price would you buy a next generation burner?

voted $150, but i would only buy it if media was more affordable

Wow 6 votes only and 2 posts? It seems that 150 euros or less is the winner right now. I may get one around Christmas though for the PC. By the way 150 euros = 202 dollars.

I've was burnt badly by panasonic when CD Writers came out - I paid just 350Euros = approx $500au .. their track record hasn't improved either. Since then I'm loathe to fork out cash for anything which isn't well into the product cycle.

I also just wouldn't fork out much more cash for any component. I just can't see the value in it (especially if media also expensive) & I'm just not that much of a freak

I would only buy one when the price is less than £50 (less than 75 Euros).

I would only consider purchasing a HD or BD Burner if one of or both the formats has been making lots of progress in terms of movie and HD/BD Player sales.

My guess is that by the time HD or BD Burner prices reach less than £50, then the blank media thats available by then should be fairly reliable as should the burners themselves.

I have not seen a HD DVD burner yet. How much are they now?

Hey rolling they have them but currently only available in a prefab Toshiba laptops.

yeah i've read that thanks. So it's kind of hard to tell what price you would consider if they aren't even available to purchase at this moment

I will most likely get a BD Burner around Christmas though for now.

You need to add "Will not buy" to the options. Same reasons I never burn DL discs.

I have Lo Res eyes now, so not sure I will jump soon.

€400 is already okay for me, but the new Pio 202 can only burn SL, otherwise that would be my purchase.

In my opinion blue laser burners won't be as cheap as the DVD burners are now. While the DVD drives managed to almost completely wipe out CD-RW writers from the market, for the majority of people BluRay/HD-DVD will be still a bit overkill. Other factors, like the more advanced copy protection will cause further inconvience, so i think the HD formats won't replace DVD completely in the near future.

While i consider even some of the original DVDs unwatchable, most of the people don't care about viewing quality. I know a lot of folks who say "DVDs are just to big" so they just stick with shitty 700MB DivX videos, or even worse they are watching cam versions not even realising that something is wrong

That's right, molnart. Draw the analogy with SACD: 9 out of 10 people are listening to mp3's these days and only a tiny minority is interested in it, so prices remain high.

Hardware pricing is almost falling to acceptable levels for early generation writers. The problem for me is the relatively high price & unknown stability of the media. If the media is price around €2-3 with similar stability/longevity to DVD media, I will buy it.

Under $150 and the blank media would have to come down to about $6. Otherwise, I just stick with my regular burner, upconverting dvd player and 30 cent blanks.

Even simple readers in Australia cost $US350 (eg BDC-S02BK). Until i can buy a dual format reader for under $200, i'm not interested.

Lol .. don't even get me started
My brother copies his movies with DVDShrink with AEC off & says nothing is wrong ....
I'd say the quality is on par with a 300MB screener

DVD is not good enough quality for detailed movies. LOTR really showed the flaws in the low bitrate mpeg2 streams, but of course, lots of others are either poorly mastered, or just haven't got the bitrate for decent quality.

It's like playing atari 2600 games all again .. minus the joystick!

I don't have a problem spending a lot of money on the burner. I do have a problem spending so much on the media. Looks like i'll be waiting another few years before I'm even interested in blu-ray or HD-DVD.

Now, for me it has to be the same price per gigbyte as for DVDs in order to move to HDDVD... so a DVD 4G is around 0.4$... a HDDVD of 15G would be around 1.5$ otherwise is clearly not worth the money... The recording unit may be expensive but we need the media to be affordable because logically we buy one unit but burn hundreds of discs, so the price of the unit will soon compensate the investment. So, I guess I'll have to wait more than 2 years in order to buy such thing.