In a surprising move, the German arm of Sony has decided to give you credit on purchasing a Blu-ray player by bringing in your HD DVD player.

In what almost seems like some form of exchange of prisoners of war, Sony has teamed up with a Saturn, a major electronics retailer in Germany, to help HD DVD fans make the switch to Blu-ray.

The advertisement (picture below, in German, credit to Blu-ray.com) says that if you bring in an HD DVD player, they will give you a credit of €150 on the Sony BDP-S300.  This unit normally retails for €499 (approx $737.65), so the exchange would lower it to €349 (approx $515.91).  While still not the cheapest solution in the world for a format exchange, at least it would get what many view as a “dead player” out of your home.

The odds of this happening in the United States seems fairly slim.  The USA had the highest adoption rate of HD DVD, so it would cost Sony considerably more to try to carry off a similar deal here.  As someone who chose HD DVD in the format war, I would love to see this offer come to the states, but I’m not exactly hopeful of that happening.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 12:21 pm under High Definition Formats, Opinion.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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