Pictures of your local HD DVD/Blu-ray sections (Bandwidth friendly)

[dobyblue]

Okay so there has been much talk of how different stores have dusty releases from one format or the other and one format having sparse shelves, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.
In my experience both sections received a fair bit of attention of the holiday season. I'm going to post my local stores and you can so the same too, but I'd like to propose a few guidelines.
IMG code is very cool for a site to allow, but it also can chew up bandwidth. I don't think there are heaps of donations from the members here towards the maintenence of the site, so to keep this thread from causing bandwidth nightmares and the loss of IMG code I'd like anyone who wants to post to do the following.
1) Use Image Shack to host your new photos
http://www.imageshack.us/
2) If you have a slow upload connection feel free to select Image Shack's resizing
3) Select the thumbnail option to copy it into the thread so that the amount of bandwidth used for the image is negligible. No full size IGM images.
This could be a lot of fun to see what each other's area stores look like. Obviously I'll be going first.
Thanks to everyone who follows the guidelines. Mods please let me know if there are additional guidelines you'd like followed.
Lastly, to all fanboys of either format, Happy New Year and all the best for 2007; let's hope for more great HD throughout the year as the two formats continue to push each other.

[MichaelHDDVD]

There are no pictures here yet, but there are a few things to keep in mind when looking a pictures of full or near empty HD DVD/Blu-Ray sections

When does that store stock their High Def movies?
Do they stock Blu-Ray and HD DVD on the same day?
Do they Stock them as they arrive at the store?

A fully stocked shelf means one of two things

1. The movies have been recently stocked
2. The movies aren't selling

Both of those options are equally as possible in my opinion

A near empty-shelf could mean three things

1. The movies have been selling very well
2. Movies haven't been stocked recently because the movies are selling poorly
3. If movies aren't selling at all it is possible that some of the movies could of been sent back to the distributor

The third option seems the least likely of the three I don't know if places like Best Buy ship unsold movies back to tthe distributor. Obviously stores won't order more copies of a movie if it isn't selling well. So an empty could be very good, or not so good.

[dobyblue]

Here's the HD DVD section from Best Buy.


Here's the Blu-ray section from Best Buy.


Here is the HD DVD section from Future Shop, who just finished their buy 2 get one free promotion on all CD, HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs. No DVDs though!


Here's the Blu-ray section from Future Shop


Wal-Mart has one end with both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs in it.
The top three rows are Blu-ray, the bottom three are HD DVD.
Here's the view from one side with the HD DVD page facing.


Here's the Wal-Mart section from the Blu-ray facing page.

[MichaelHDDVD]

I'm gonna take pictures. But just pictures of prices.

Cicuit City has the Mission Impossible pack on HD DVD for $90! Wal-Mart has it for $60. Best Buy has it for $72. All of those prices are the HD DVD version.

Personally I am much more interested in prices of movies on each format.

[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by Rico Suave

The point is that pictures of any place won't do anything to help, and will only cause more arguments.
If one side looks more "shopped", the other side will just make excuses and vice versa.
But hey, if people want to participate, then they can act like fools as much as they want.

At Best Buy the HD DVD section looked more shopped than the Blu-ray. At Future Shop and Wal-Mart it looked pretty even.
This is HD DVD vs. Blu-ray. So this thread is in keeping with that concept.
The only people that will think it's juvenile are people that have claimed their local store has a bare HD DVD section with a chock-full Blu-ray section as they will not be able to take a picture and prove it.
Other people are just plain interested to see what other people's sections look like.
I think the Walmart section is quite small, but someone else said it's huge compared to their local section and my town is only 120,000 people.

[ss1129]

Oh and not to be a ****, but ther are a hell of a lot more movies in br at BB and WM in your pics. I dont even know what the 3rd store is. So far your shooting yourself in the foot.

[dobyblue]

Here's my Best Buy's HD DVD display.


Here's the Blu-ray display.

[imdaly]

I actually have been wanting a thread like this to be made for a while now, so I disagree that this is a pathetic thread. There's always a lot of talk on this board about how different stores are treating the two formats, and until now, nobody's actually put up pictures of it.

I took a couple pictures of my store today, and they are uploading now. A couple of them turned out kinda blurry unfortunately, so I apologize in advance about that. I had to take them really quickly because I don't think my managers would be too keen on me taking pictures of the store and posting them on the net.

[OrangeCrush]

Well I for one am not walking into Best Buy with my digital Camera and taking pictures of the HD racks. I will keep my dignity intact with the people I am friends with at the store, lol. You can believe what I have said regarding this matter or you dont have to believe me in this matter, its that simple. My Best Buy, located at Novi, Michigan, clearly sells a ton more HD-DVD than BD which is further backed up by the sales people I know there that tell me the exact same thing. I dont purchase titles anymore at Best Buy not because of their 5 dollar higher prices but because I can never find the damn titles I am looking for and its not because they dont stock them but because they are sold out.

Again you can choose to believe this or you can write it off as completely fabricated fanboy BS. It really doesn't matter to me as I know what I see on a day to day basis there and believe it or not I am basically there every day, lol. I spend way too much time and money in that damn store. If I am not buying videogames I am buying movies or blank DVD's or labels or printer ink or batteries etc... I go there way to much.

So again believe it or not but at least for that one particular store, BD is losing big time. Of course this means nothing in the big picture but it is what it is and it is HD-DVD kicking BD's butt in Novi, MI

OC...

[imdaly]

Ok here we go:

First off, this is the Circuit City that I work at in Parkersburg, WV.

I'll show off the actual demos first.

As of today we now have two Blu-ray players on demo (the Panasonic and the Sony) and two HD DVD players on demo (XBOX360 drive and the HDA2).


^ This is the new Sony demo that just came in today. They are currently demoing "Monster House" on it. I can't tell you which TVs these are, cause I forgot to check, and I don't know nearly enough about which models are which to tell you simply by looking at them.



^ This is the Toshiba HDA2 HD DVD player. Notice it's on a much smaller TV than the others. It's currently playing "Superman Returns". Until I came by tonight to take a picture here, the demo was just sitting in the main menu without any movie actually playing. Needless to say, I made sure to actually start PLAYING the movie for the aud/vid guys.



^ Here you see the other two demos. On the left is the XBOX360 HD DVD drive and on the right is the Panasonic Blu-ray demo. The Blu-ray demo is always showing of the official Blu-ray demo disc (which includes a trailer to Microsoft's "Kameo", btw). The XBOX360 HD DVD demo shows off "King Kong" whenever they actually have it on. I say this because most of the time unless I actually go over there and start it, the guys there don't actually even have the XBOX360 ON most of the time! The TV with the XBOX360 and HD DVD drive today was playing some football game all day today until I went over there, turned on the XBOX360 and booted up "King Kong". But will you ever see the Blu-ray demos not showing off Blu-ray? Never.




^ Here is the Blu-ray cart we have setting near our Blu-ray demos. Two sides have access to all the Blu-ray titles we carry, and the other two sides are signage telling the benefits of the format. We carry many more BD titles than we have slots for, so many titles are doubled up or even tripled up.



^ Finally, this is the HD DVD disc setup I put up. It's important to note that CC's official what-to-do-with-HDDVD-titles is to mix them in with SD DVDs in their approprate genre section. But since we have this nice big section with nothing to go there (it used to be our New Release section for DVDs) I put it upon myself to make this the HD DVD section. I keep it alphabetized (although I'm noticing they're not in complete order at that point in time) and with each individual movie having its own slot. We currently carry 45 HD DVD titles, as opposed to at least 80 Blu-ray titles.

The open columns on the left of the HD DVD section is where, up until yesterday, our X-Mas DVDs sat. Something else will go there sometime in the next couple days, but for now it's just empty and ugly. The empty spots in the midst of the HD DVD section are actual sold-out titles.

Currently we are out of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "Superman Returns", "World Trade Center", "Batman Begins", "Mission Impossible 3", "Mission Impossible Trillogy", "Phantom of the Opera", "Land of the Dead", "Nacho Libre", "Polar Express", and "Training Day".

Today I saw our 2nd and 3rd Blu-ray movie sell in the history of our store.

Now with our store anyway, we always get about 5 copies of every Blu-ray title in when they release, and usually 1 or 2 copies of each HD DVD when they release. Lately though, we've started to get a few more copies of the latest HD DVDs when they come out. "Superman Returns", "Blazing Saddles", and "Jet Li: Fearless" are 3 titles that come to mind as us having at least 5 copies sent to us each time they come in.



So there you have my store. I apologize about the blurry pictures, and also for forgetting to get a nice snapshot of the Blu-ray clipboard our aud/vid guys walk around work with, but you get the idea...

[Bee]

In addition to posting your pictures, please let us know if you are also questioned by the employees, looked at oddly by other customers, or arrested (or in imdaly's case, canned)....and be honest.

[OrangeCrush]

Originally Posted by Bee

In addition to posting your pictures, please let us know if you are also questioned by the employees, looked at oddly by other customers, or arrested (or in imdaly's case, canned)....and be honest.

LOL...Hilarious


You know what we could do next. We could actually do a house to house and start looking into people's living rooms and we could start taking pictures of everyones movie collection. I am sure people wouldnt mind seeing people peekinginto thier house with digital cameras and taking pictures of their living room.A couple might call the police but i bet only a few here and there. By the way bullet proof vests might be something to consider.


OC..

[Net]

This is actually a great thread! We can finally see proof of what all the posters say when one "sells more than the other". I always thought it was just a "you see what you want to see" scenario , but now looking at real pictures I can see that the stores are really pushing Blu Ray a lot, even though HD DVD sells a bit better.

I was amazed at the size difference of the HDTVs that displayed both formats. Great thread!

[JU1CYFRU1T]

Okay, THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM GOING TO POST THIS (probably not, but I really am getting tired of posting it)... DO NOT HIJACK SOMEONE ELSES THREAD!!! I don't care if you think the thread is stupid! If you don't like it, do read the thread. If you think this is a 'pissing contest'... think again... DO NOT ATTACK OTHER POSTERS! You have been warned (again, read the forum rules anouncement at the top of the main Smackdown page). If you post something off topic in this thread, or an attack at someone who is posting on topic, I will delete your post, and suspend your posting privledges. If you think I'm bluffing... try me!

Doby, with your permission, I would like to move this post to the General Discussion thread, so that there won't be any fanboy type format bashing. I will wait for you to post an okay before I move the thread, but it seems to me like that was your original intention (a bash-free thread with pics from different stores).

Let me know

[Bee]

hey, don't get me wrong, I'm just as interested, but I don't have the guts to go in with a camera and take pictures at my local Wal-mart, although, if there is one place it wouldn't be too out of place it would be Wal-mart...I'm just having fun, it cracks me up how dedicated we are in our support. But this should go to the general section (even though, it can be a ghost town over there sometimes).