The NPD Group released some of its retail sales tracking data on Wednesday that showed sales of Blu-ray standalone players (not a PlayStation 3, combo player, or PC with Blu-ray drive) had mostly decreased since the beginning of the year.

Despite Toshiba's HD-DVD throwing the towel in February, standalone Blu-ray player unit sales in the U.S. decreased 40 percent from January to February and saw a very slight increase (2 percent) between February and March, according to NPD.

Analysts at NPD gave two main reasons why the sale of Blu-ray players are down:

1. DVD is "good enough" for most consumers. And that the picture offered by a Blu-ray Disc and accompanying player doesn't appear so overwhelmingly better than a standard DVD and many consumers can't justify the dramatically increased cost.

2. Cost. Regular DVD players did not became a common commodity untill they hit $100 mark, and that might be the magic price for Blu-ray player sales to take off. But that might be couple of years away as Sony recently announced that $200 players aren't likely until next year at the earliest.

http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_080430.html