Back in 2006, Samsung sold the first Blu-ray players for public consumption at the low, low price of $1,000. Other things that cost that much? One-thousand chicken nuggets or a great down payment on a crappy car. Fortunately, prices have dropped steadily. Now, High-Def Digest is reporting that prices for Blu-ray players might drop lower than $40 this year. That’s a 2500% decrease in price over a little less than 5 years. Plus, you can now buy more movies than 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight’s Tale, The Last Waltz, Resident Evil Apocalypse, and xXx on the format. So that’s great. Blu-ray firmly won the format war against HD-DVD, and now it looks like it’s poised to become the household replacement to DVD players (that even my parents might want to get). In fact, they might be bundled alongside televisions (which are also dropping in price), making their proliferation even more pronounced. Seems like so long ago that they hit the scene. Time to update my Betamax, because this news gives even more weight to Fure’s argument for everyone to buy Blu-ray players.

Ding dong, HD-DVD is dead. But who really lost? We think that maybe it’s the consumer…