Sony: The bad and good

Sony BMG has finally agreed to sell DRM-free music downloads. However, if you want one of the 37 available albums (no single track downloads), you have to go to your local Best Buy or other retailer and purchase a card for $13. You can then bring the card home, and download that album to your computer.

Why would anyone actually want to do this?!?


Sony BMG trades cards for downloaded tunes - USATODAY.com

On another Sony front, I got a chance to see Sony's new prototype OLED TV yesterday at the Sony Style store at Beachwood Place. It's pretty amazing to see a 3mm thin tv screen that has a picture that blows away any LCD TV on the market.

Sony's 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio 27-inch OLED HDTV - Engadget

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I'll take cash, please

I use a credit card that has the "WorldPoints" reward program feature. I have always just waited until I build up enough points for a 1% cash reward and then request a refund check. I decided, however, to see what sort of value WorldPoints is providing for the merchandise in their catalog. I found an item that was just over the 1% cash back point threshold of 25,000 points.

See the image below for the Hamilton Beach Eclectrics mixer which can be yours for only 25,200 points!



Now take a look below and see that, alternatively, you could redeem those 25,000 points for $250 in cash.



So...is buying the blender for those points a better value than the $250 in cash?

Ummmm....no.

According to the Hamilton Beach website, this blender has a MSRP of $200.



And anyone who has shopped online in the past decade knows that you can usually find products cheaper than MSRP on stores like Amazon. Here is the same blender on Amazon.com for $186.



So, if you were to redeem 25,000 WorldPoints for a blender, instead of the $250 in cash, you would effectively be overpaying for that blender by $64!