Yet DVD didn't really take off as a format until the price dropped below $200.00.

Great point. Everyone was in land-grab mode at that time. I got Titanic from reel.com for 50% off plus a free copy of The Shining. Anyone remember Amazon's "40% off all pre-orders" period? I'm glad those days are over.

Then again, I guess we had something similar with the high-def wars. And then some people still say "Why can't we get those buy-one-get-two-free deals any more like we did for HD DVDs?"

I think DVD drives in computers may have helped, too. My old eMachine was my first DVD player.

Another great point. I never had a DVD drive in my old PC, but I know quite a lot of people did. DVDs were portable in a way that VHS wasn't, and laptops emphasized that. Now you could throw DVDs into a CD wallet, and you were watching The Tailor of Panama on your buddy's laptop in a hotel room driving home from Vegas for Christmas.

I bought my first DVD player in 1999, and I know I didn't pay a full $300 for it. $280-ish sounds right. I know I was the first person among my family or friends who adopted the format. Secondly, our economy has been in a state of decline since 2002; most of us did the majority of our DVD buying since then.

PRICE- I bought laserdiscs before DVD came out (VHS SUCKS!) but couldn't impulse-buy them because of their high prices.

For me, it was simply the fact that the stores in Chinatown switched from VHS to DVD rather suddenly and I couldn't find desired Hong Kong films on VHS anymore. That was the major factor in my buying my first DVD player. That and the fact that anime DVDs were coming out in bilingual editions so I no longer had to agonize between the cheaper English-dubbed VHS vs. the higher priced Japanese-with-subs edition. I can't believe how many crappy English dubs I bought in the VHS era because I didn't want to spend $10 more for the Japanese language edition.

Ironically, the Japanese video store in NYC that I regularly visit switched over from VHS to DVD rather late--in 2007. And in a month's time, between one visit in July and the next in August, they got rid of their entire VHS stock, including many titles I wanted that have NOT come out on DVD. I went in there looking to buy one series and their entire VHS stock was gone. That was pretty upsetting. No announcement, no attempt to have a sale or anything. Just gone. I'm still pissed.

I remember paying about $349 for a Sony. Not a great deal, I guess, but I got it at a specialty store ("hi-fi") and wanted in on the technology because I had already started collecting movies on VHS (LA Confidential, Con Air).

That's a hell of a hotel room... was it manual or automatic

Dammit! I knew something about that didn't look right after I'd typed it. Anyway, it was an automatic. Now you know...

Coming from a laserdisc collection, it was disc size and picture quality for me. Plus I got my first widescreen TV in '98 so the anamorphic transfer was a huge upgrade from LD.

I think it's because you get a much clearer picture when you pause nude scenes on DVD. VHS had fuzzy lines that would always block the best part.

^^

Sick!

^I'm not quite understanding what is wrong with Matome's post??