If you bought an HD DVD player from Circuit City within the past 90 days, the store will take it back and let you apply the original purchase price toward a Blu-ray player. This change to Circuit City’s usual 30-day return policy was first reported by Gizmodo. I called the new Circuit City store in Maple Grove to confirm that it’s available in the Twin Cities, and, after checking with a manager, the customer-service rep said it was. The only catch: You have to ask for it, and you can only apply the credit toward a Blu-ray player. (Some Internet reports have said some stores are also offering the credit in the form of a gift card, so your experience might vary.)

Is this a good deal? Star Tribune consumer reporter John Ewoldt, my next-cubicle neighbor, insists that it is. I certainly want to give props to Circuit City for magnanimously extending its return policy in this unusual situation, especially since it was one of the retailers that moved thousands of Toshiba HD DVD players at discount prices before the holidays. (I contacted Crutchfield and Best Buy, two other such retailers, to see if they were offering a similar return policy, but neither has gotten back to me.)

But I wonder if this is such a great deal from a practical perspective — and several comments on online forums have caught on to this, too.

Let me explain: If you bought an HD DVD player in the past few months, you surely bought several discs, too, besides the five to seven that you got free by mail as part of the purchase. You can return the player, but what are you going to do with those discs? It’s not as if they stopped working when HD DVD lost the format war to Blu-ray. If anything, you should be buying up clearance-priced HD DVDs and maybe even a backup player now while retailers are clearing out their inventories. In fact, I’ll be writing soon about HD DVD deals online.

But John correctly points out that not everyone is tech-crazy like me, with a dozen components connected to my home theater. Those who simply guessed wrong in the format war and feel they got stuck with an HD DVD player – and who don’t want a jillion DVD players – would think this is a great offer.

So, if you want to get out of HD DVD while you still can and you bought your player at Circuit City within the past 90 days, now’s the time to go to one of its stores and return it toward a Blu-ray player.   

Update: I heard back from Best Buy. Spokesman Brian Lucas said: “We don’t comment on our competitors.  At Best Buy we do our best to educate customers about new technologies.  And in the case of next-generation formats, we try to be clear that one format will win. That said, we understand the frustration that some HD-DVD purchasers may be feeling and we have been looking at options for what we may be able to do to help ease that frustration.”

So no matching policy from Best Buy — yet. But since the Associated Press, ABC News and other major media outlets are now reporting Circuit City’s move, Best Buy might have to match it to keep pace.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under DVDs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.