Boom for DVD Players

Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) players have become the UK's fastest growing consumer entertainment product ever. The player has sold almost three million in its first three years, according to a Warner Home Video report published earlier this week.

The compact disc (CD) player and video recorder achieved similar sales in seven years. It is a well known fact that DVDs offer higher quality pictures and sound than video recorders, plus extra features.

The new report details how two million DVD players have been sold in 2001 and the price has halved since last year to an average of £180. Given this year's sales, Warner estimates that one in 10 households now have a DVD player. Of the actual discs themselves, 26.5 million are thought to have been bought so far this year, which is twice as many as in the same period last year.

According to Chris Jenkins, editor of Total DVD magazine, said 'It's a technology that people want. You can't sell people something that they don't want and there's a long history of failed systems and formats that just goes to show that if people are buying DVD, it must be giving them what they want. The VHS (video recorder) is 20 years old and looking pretty lame compared to the sort of technology you see at the cinema, and the DVD is basically offering the equivalent of the cinema experience in your own home.'

Professor Harold Thimbleby, director of University College London Interactive Centre, added 'The problem I can see is that the DVD is much better, that people will probably end up throwing away their old televisions, old two-channel amplifiers and old CD players. And it's a very complicated system. It would be easy to go to a shop and get confused by all the options there and end up spending an awful lot of money on a system that makes everything you've got at home obsolete.'

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.