Wal-Mart, Best Buy Cut HD-DVD Owners Slack

Good news for some HD-DVD player owners out there. The Wall Street Journal claims that anyone who bought an HD-DVD player from Wal-Mart on or after November 1, 2007 can return the player for “a refund or a gift card.” Apparently you don’t even need to have the original box that the player came in, just walk into the store by April 30th with your kicking-and-screaming HD-DVD player, and hand it off to the store clerk that had the gumption to sell it to you in the first place.

The article also reports that Best Buy will give customers a $50 gift card to anyone who bought an Xbox 360 HD-DVD player unit bought before February 23, 2008. You can use that to buy the HD-DVD of Scary Movie 3 or add to your still-budding LaserDisc collection. The cards will be given out until May 1st to anyone “who bought warranties or who are part of [Wal-Mart’s] ‘Reward Zone’ program.”

Looks like the big-box retailers are cutting the early adopters some slack this time around. Too bad there aren’t any offers available to those that have HD-DVD built into their laptops. Toshiba, Gateway, how about some reimbursements?