Warner Brothers has launched a new service that sounds fantastic on paper but turns out to be useless in practice. On DVD2Blu.com, for a low price, you can trade up your old DVD for the Blu-ray equivalent. Sounds good, right? Except you're limited to only 55 barebones releases to select from, and you have to pay additional shipping and tax to get it delivered to you in 5 weeks. It adds up to not being worth the effort.
A standard order of one title will set you back $7.95 + $4.95 in shipping, for a total of $12.90. Some of the newer/biger releases (Body of Lies, Speed Racer, Superman Returns) are $9.95 a piece, for a total of $14.90. Not including tax, depending on where you are. The website says that you get free shipping if your order is more than $25, but that number is obviously a con, since in order to pass $25, you'd have to trade in at least 4 DVDs for a total of $31.80.
The reason why this trading deal is useless is that you can actually buy the same Blu-rays for less—without having to mail in your DVD or wait 4-5 weeks' worth of processing. Here are just a sample of what we've discovered on Amazon as of writing:
Cheaper
American History X - $9.99
A Clockwork Orange - $9.99
2001: A Space Odyssey - $9.49
Blazing Saddles - $8.99
The Searchers - $7.99
The Aviator - $9.99
Beetlejuice - $10.49
Michael Clayton - $9.99
Training Day - $10.99
Dark City (Director's Cut) - $9.99
Less than a dime more
Speed Racer - $14.99
10,000 B.C. - $14.99
Any Given Sunday (Director's Cut) - $14.99
Well, you get the picture. For some of them, you'd be able to trade up an edition. Full Metal Jacket, for example, by trading the old DVD copy you would get the new remastered Deluxe Edition Blu-ray. Of course, once again, it's only $10.99 on Amazon
Why am I counting the shipping cost of DVD2Blu but not Amazon's? Because they're all eligible for Amazon's Free Super Saver Shipping—just combine them with any item you want—whereas with the trade, unless you own at least 4 of these titles on DVD, you'll most likely be paying that shipping fee.
It's not that WB is giving out a bum rap and the service has no value. In fact, a few sought after titles like Pan's Labyrinth is cheaper to trade. It's just that the trading prices are either of no value or too close to bother. I'd love for more studios to implement this kind of service and offer a wider variety of titles as we move towards abandoning yesterday's platform (WB's previous service that exchanges the obsolete HD-DVD for a Blu-ray copy, Red2Blu, exists for that reason), giving customers a tiny bit of incentive to finally switch to High-Definition—but it has to be a rewarding deal for the customer, too. The Criterion Collection, for one, offers the same but equally financially unconvincing service as DVD2Blu. Just an idea: how about a $1 exchange of a DVD for a Digital Copy? Save people the hassle of ripping/converting.
So, before you jump on this program, take a good look around first. Chances are you'll find that buying a new Blu-ray copy is a better option than trading your old DVDs. If not, then you know what to write Santa.
