A Price Comparison

Let us compare these amounts:
— Cost of my early-adopter Sony DVD player in 2001: approximately IR£500.
— Cost of getting that DVD player chipped to play multi-region discs in 2003: €100. (This worked for about six weeks and then packed-in. After driving back and forth across the city a few times getting it looked at, I had to abandon the whole idea and archive my Region One DVD’s.)
— Cost of getting that DVD player fixed to correct the playback heads in 2004: €100.
— Cost of an Aldi own-brand Region Two DVD player in June 2006: €40.
(Why Region Two? It does not happen to play Region One discs by any chance? Yes indeed it does.)

Looks like the combination of Moore’s Law and good old Globalisation has worked in my favour again this time. Although I feel a little bummed that I could have bought fifteen new DVD players for my investment in my original model.

(And let’s not have any comments about the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square being the person who spot-welded the faceplate onto my new super cost-effective DVD player, yadda yadda. I’m over it.)