In the best Blu-ray deal yet, Amazon is selling a Sony player and four discs of your choice for as low as $143 shipped, after redeeming all offers. Dealnews explains how it works. The player, Sony’s BDP-S300, doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of later players (be sure to read the comments from Amazon buyers), but it still does the basic thing: play Blu-ray movies. Dealnews points out that the Amazon deal also can be used to get an 80GB PlayStation 3 with four movies for $366 shipped — another great deal and still the best Blu-ray player available.

Tech observer Robin Harris of ZDNet skewers Sony for sending Blu-ray into “a death spiral.” It gets better:

“12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product,” he crows. “With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it. … In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession.”

Is Harris right? Maybe.

The prices of Blu-ray players are indeed dropping. Several models are available below $200. In fact, earlier this week, Dealnews posted bargains for a Sylvania model with four Blu-ray movies for $170 shipped and a BD-Live-capable Sony model for $193 shipped. There will be better deals as the holidays approach.

But player prices aren’t the problem; disc prices are, something Harris barely covers in his business-oriented screed. Blu-ray Discs are simply too expensive – for consumers, not producers. I don’t care if Amazon regularly has 2-for-1 sales or about other online promotional gimmicks. Those are random and tend to be title specific. The truth is that BDs generally have a retail price of $35-$40, usually the latter. That MSRP is the foundation for any sale. Until BDs are the same retail price as their DVD counterparts, which some consumer curmudgeons still think are too high, mainstream consumers will continue to view them as a niche product. I’m talking across-the-board cuts, as an industry. Only Warner Home Video seems to realize this, as it sets an MSRP for many of its new-movie BDs around $35 and catalog titles at $30.

I also have a huge problem with Harris citing the stat that Blu-ray has “only a 4% share of US movie disc sales.” That figure is horribly skewed. There are about 800 Blu-ray titles and 92,000 DVD titles, according to Nielsen Research. It’s not valid to compare a small pool of BDs with a much, much larger pool of DVDs. To be meaningful, the comparison must be made on units sold (not total sales) and only on titles available in both formats. I don’t know what that number is. BDs will surely still be a fraction of DVDs but not as small as 4 percent. (In its weekly report on the market, the Digital Bits cites a 6 percent share of U.S. DVD sales for Blu-ray. It has been as high as 12.)

Finally, Harris touts high-def downloads as something that’s killing Blu-ray. This might end up happening. Based on my experience, it won’t be anytime soon. I recently went on Xbox Live to download a high-def movie (something also available on the PlayStation Network). I picked a movie not available on Blu-ray and selected it to watch. A few hours later, the huge file still hadn’t finished downloading. Once I sat down to watch the film the next night, it looked better than I expected but nowhere near the quality I’d expect from Blu-ray. As big as the file was, it was still compressed to minimize (!) the download time. HD downloads still have a ways to go.

It’s way too early to be digging Blu-ray’s grave. This holiday season, Blu-ray’s first with sole control of the HD disc market, will be a good indicator of its future.

Frank Marshall has recorded DVD commentary, but he understands why director Steven Spielberg doesn’t care for the feature. Marshall, who has produced dozens of huge films (the Bourne films, Jurassic Park, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, etc.), talked for a while about his and Spielberg’s differing views on recording commentary when I interviewed him for my Sunday column about today’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

“I think it’s up to the filmmaker,” said Marshall (pictured on the Crystal Skull set with Cate Blanchett, Spielberg and Harrison Ford). “I think Steven likes to live it in the moment. That’s what’s great about our being able to capture so much  in the moment [with the documentary footage on the new Indy DVD] that I think he doesn’t feel he has to do commentary because you’re seeing so much of it happen in the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

Besides being a producer, Marshall also has directed several films, including Arachnophobia, Alive and Eight Below, for which he recorded commentary on DVD and Blu-ray.

“One of the hardest things to do as a director is to sit there and watch the movies and talk about it,” he said, “because I always go off on a tangent and then, ‘Oh, we’re two scenes later. What happened here?’ And then you’re exhausted by the end of it.”

That’s partly because, he said, recording commentaries is a one-take affair. So why did he do it?

“I did it because I’m a team player,” he said. “It’s an extra that’s on the DVD that they [studios] like to have on there.”

To help himself, he brought in colleagues to contribute to his Eight Below commentary, such as the cameraman and actor Paul Walker.

“I needed other people on there because I start running out of words,” he said. But, he added, “It should be up to each filmmaker how you want to present how you made the movie.”

The Dark Knight finally has a release date on DVD: Dec. 9. When I did my fall preview a few weeks ago, Warner Home Video had not yet announced the year’s biggest movie for home viewers — although it was widely expected to arrive in time for Christmas, as I noted then.

The early indications are that the two-disc set ($35) and Blu-ray release ($36) will not have as many extras as Tuesday’s Iron Man DVD, which I wrote about on Sunday. Here is what will be on The Dark Knight discs, according to Warner:

2-Disc Special Edition:

* Gotham Uncovered – How Christopher Nolan and his team developed the new Bat-suit and Bat-pod and composer Hans Zimmer musically characterized The Joker’s reign of chaos.
* The Dark Knight IMAX® Scenes - View these 6 action-packed sequences - shot on the largest format possible - in their original IMAX framing, just as they were intended
* Gotham Tonight - 6 episodes of Gotham Cable’s premier news programÂ
* The Galleries: Poster art and production stills
* Digital Copy of the Feature Film   

Blu-ray Disc:

Disc 1 – Movie with Focus Points
* Gotham Uncovered: Creation of a Scene – Director Christopher Nolan and creative collaborators unmask the incredible detail and planning behind the film, including stunt staging, filming in IMAX®, and the new Bat-suit and Bat-pod.
Â
Disc 2 – Special Features
* Batman Tech  – The incredible gadgets and tools (in HD)
* Batman Unmasked: The Psychology of  The  Dark   Knight  – Delve into the psyche of Bruce Wayne and the world of Batman through real-world psychotherapy (in HD)  Â
* Gotham Tonight – 6 episodes of Gotham Cable’s premier news program Â
* The Galleries – The Joker cards, concept art, poster art, production stills, trailers and TV spots
* Digital Copy of the Feature Film

As with the Iron Man DVD, the glaring omission among the extras is a commentary track, although even the rest of the supplements don’t seem as substantial. Expect a better Batman package in time for Christmas 2009.

Looking to upgrade to Blu-ray without buying a PS3? Amazon is blowing out Sony’s BDP-S300 Blu-ray player for $200 shipped, 50 percent off — as reported by High Def Digest. The BDP-S300 doesn’t have the ability to play enhanced features such as picture-in-picture back ground material and web-enabled extras via BD Live, as the PlayStation 3 does, but it also is at least half the price. That might be good enough for people who just want to watch movies in high-definition without all the frills.

Several readers have replied in the wake of my article on the Cooper Theatre and Cinerama that there were more than two feature films made in the Cinerama format, as I noted, besides travelogues and documentaries. They cited such classic films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Blue Max and Custer of the West. They’re wrong. Oh, yes, they might have seen those films “in Cinerama” at the Cooper or elsewhere, but they were not Cinerama films.

There were indeed only two feature-length movies filmed in three-strip Cinerama, How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. The rest were documentaries, travelogues and hodgepodge films such as This Is Cinerama, which had scene after scene of material to demonstrate the immensity of the format, such as a first-person roller-coaster ride. These films were shot using three cameras and shown using three projectors, creating the three-strip Cinerama film I wrote about — one that has created problems for DVD releases.

That doesn’t mean regular films weren’t shown at Cinerama theaters such as the Cooper. But they were faux Cinerama. For example, Custer of the West was filmed in a widescreen 70mm format called Super Technirama (aspect ratio of 2.21:1 instead of Cinerama’s 2.89:1). Such a film was shown at the Cooper using one projector (instead of Cinerama’s three) with a special lens to adapt the image to the huge curved screen. The same goes for the other films, which were made in various one-camera widescreen formats and shown at the Cooper using a single projector with a special adaptive lens.

They weren’t “real” Cinerama, but surely they still looked impressive on the Cooper’s huge screen.