Warfdale M5 ?price drop? yes or no

[riaz]

I saw a stack of M5's at Tesco's at a special price of 149 quid. Granted that is a bargain for a multiregion/RCE compatible/progressive scan/DD/DTS player,

BUT

someone said the price was going to drop to 99 quid.


Is this true?
On how good authority is this info?

if so I'm gonna wait before jumping in

[clayts]

Very good authority - one of my Area 450 (http://www.area450.com) team works for Tesco and has seen the internal memo.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Despite running the site, I still don't own an M5 (I'm still stuck with the Encore DV450), but if they come down to £100, I'm gonna get me one and rip it apart with my bare hands - the Sampo experts are fed up with this machine being an enigma (i.e. can you run other Sampo firmware on it and get rid of Macrovision or what ?!) and want to be able to help other owners.

Rumours are that the M5 is coming to the end of its production run at Sampo Taiwan, as they will be concentrating on the next player to hit these shores, which will be a UK version of the DVE611 in sexy silver.

[riaz]

DVE611

so is there anything about this player that should make one pause to buy it?

[clayts]

Hopefully the price will be lower than previous Sampo clones, and it can be made region-free by applying a very odd hack (a CD-R burned with a single line of ASCII text !).

However, as yet, there is no Macrovision hack.

The player will beknown as the Digitron DVE860, and Futuretronic advise me it will sell for £149 or less.

Early indications stateside are that the player is excellent value for the money, as it is based on different components from Sampo players of old.

There's a picture of one at Area 450 in The Sampo Zone (in the Player Guide section)

[neverland]

Just had a look at Area 450 this morning, and it seems the 50 quid price drop is off.

Oh well, it still seems to be pretty good value, and now I don't have to wait to get one.

[clayts]

Yeah, it's basically Tesco being a bunch of tightwads at the end of the day, but I couldn't really say that on the site :D

It's also a darned shame that they've put orders for it on hold, which they're blaming on the distributor who supply Futuretronic and GC Computing (you can see them at Northern Computer Fairs with their stacks of £155 M5 players - that was the reason Tesco dropped the price to £149, as opposed to the launch price of £180) undercutting Tesco.

You'd think with their buying power Tesco would be able to knock the M5 out at £99 a bang, but it seems they're more concerned with the price of lard these days :(

[neverland]

Oh well, I got one on Friday night anyway. £100 would have been nice, but after using some Clubcard vouchers it came to £143, so I felt like I made a bit of a saving.

Look out for me in the Area 450 forums, asking daft questions. :)

[pjohn290260]

Just bought the M5 at Tesco Extra store at Newport , Gwent for £99.99.

Paul290260:
clap:

[clayts]

Newport is the only Tesco store selling them at this price, unfortunately, due to an in-town price war with Morrisons :mad: