I was thinking about buying a blu-ray player, but will hold off a bit longer until the all-region players come down in price.

However, after the debacle with DVD region coding, why did anybody sanction the same with Blu-Ray? What a waste of money developing this. Did anybody in the board room mention the fact that it was the equivalent of just throwing R&D money out of the window? Why didn't they donate the cash to a local hospital? Perhaps the donated money could have resulted in a new kidney machine. I'm not being flippant here.

The mind boggles.

Just more proof of how out of touch Sony management really is, despite the fact that they have access to excellent technology.

We consumers may not like it but the implementation of region coding was one of the deciding factors in winning the format war.
Fox and Disney demanded a region code and HD DVD didn't offer that. (Region coding is in the HD DVD specs too but as of now no HD DVD was region coded and none of the current players could detect a region code.)

So from Sony's point of view it was the right decision to implement region coding into Blu-ray.

BTW only about 20 % of Blu-ray discs are region coded and it is mandatory that after one year repressings of region coded titles have to be released region free.

So the region code is MUCH less of a problem than it was on DVD.

I'm in Germany and so far I only have a region-B player. So far there is not a single title that I would want and that is not playable in my machine. (THE USUAL SUSPECTS would be on my want list if it wouldn't have gotten such bad reviews regarding its picture quality.)

BTW Warner have already said that their Blu-ray discs will stay region-free even after they go Blu-ray exclusive.