HD-DVD and Blu-ray sales are not as good as analysts had hoped, and retailers are not happy with the market to date. Technical issues and confusion over the competing formats are a few of the reasons cited for the weak market response.

“Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,” said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn’s.

“…Blu-ray has faced complaints of sub-par picture quality on discs, talk of component shortages for players and other technical issues…”

“…along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that’s when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn’t look much better than a standard DVD…”

Here’s the biggest reason why I believe the hi-def DVD formats are faltering…they offer consumers no compelling reason to upgrade. I’ll elaborate:

*There is no increased convenience or capability.
Some of the reasons consumers embraced the DVD format over VHS were increased capacity, the convenience of chaptering, and no rewinding.

*The quality difference is not THAT MUCH better than SD DVDs.
Yes, you can see it. But it is an incremental upgrade at best, and the average consumer (that is content with cable TV or highly-compressed satellite MPEG-2 streams) does not see the value in the High-Definition upgrade.

We previously reported on the potential blue diode shortages that may limit player availability in the immediate future.

(Via Slashdot)