For cinephiles, the news last week from Criterion that they were coming out with thirteen Blu-ray titles was a mixed blessing at best. With four-hundred-some Criterion titles and counting, the question becomes how many titles will come out in the format and how fast? What will the announcement do for sales of their non-HD titles? Will fans who were contemplating a Criterion purchase now wait in hopes it’ll come out in Blu-ray? What about the titles scheduled for release in SD between now and October? When will they arrive in HD?

For the real fanatics, this move might mean a double dip of monumental proportions. If you talk to the folks at criterionforum.org or their arch-enemies at criterionforum.com, you’ll see that many of them take collecting Criterions seriously. So seriously, in fact, that some of them display the ones they own at the bottom of their posts.

The major problem with Blu-Ray is start-up cost. As of this writing, if you go over to amazon.com and check out their prices, the cheapest standalone player you’ll find is the Sony “Spiderman 3 Limited Edition” at $329. Considering you can get a good SD player for $50, and the number of people with HD TVs is still miniscule, the odds against Blu-Ray gaining a foothold would seem daunting.

But though HD television hasn’t penetrated far into the U.S. market, the percentage of U.S. households with some form of broadband internet recently reached 57% (source: Leichtman Research). Because of this, some see the internet as significant competition for Blu-ray as a distribution medium for high definition films. But even at broadband speeds, these films can take hours to download, which mitigates against internet distribution in a culture obsessed with speed, convenience and on-demand. In addition, there are significant numbers of fans who collect films — see the denizens of the Criterion Forums above — and for them, a permanent storage medium is essential.

Still and all, the mass-acceptance of Blu-ray seems at least dependent upon getting the price of players down in a hurry. When Toshiba threw in the HD-DVD towel several months ago, it was thought that Blu-ray sales would rise. Instead, they fell by 4%. With rumors that stand-alone players will drop to only $200 by Christmas, that number may not change anytime soon.

[For the record, here are the 13 Criterion titles announced: The Third Man, Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, El Norte, The 400 Blows, Gimme Shelter , The Complete Monterey Pop, Contempt, Walkabout, For All Mankind, The Wages of Fear]

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