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Comment by rhplus | Hacker News Reader

From their blog: "The ability to sell Kinect for Xbox 360 at its current price point is in large part subsidized by consumers buying a number of Kinect games, subscribing to Xbox LIVE, and making other transactions associated with the Xbox 360 ecosystem. In addition, the Kinect for Xbox 360 was built for and tested with the Xbox 360 console only, which is why it is not licensed for general commercial use, supported or under warranty when used on any other platform."

The hardware is also a little more advanced, supporting "near mode" detection.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/

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I suppose it remains to be seen whether they'll sell as well at $249 and as a separate device vs. $149 and readily available as $100 and only needing one for both purposes. I suspect they'll sell, but at reduced volume and excluding major potential demographics.

They might do better to work towards building such an ecosystem for Windows, particularly given the wide range of uses and high level of interest which were demonstrated. "Warranty support" has not been high on the consumer values list in the existing ecosystem, so much as "cheap accessible cameras" and "does cool stuff."

I want one to play with and I'm a Linux OS user. I should have picked one up at $99 over the holidays.

The comments from the msdn blog are interesting in indicating the lifetime customer value of XBox users with a Kinect to Microsoft.

The extra cost might be worth it, if the documentation and examples were much more than simple library descriptions. I am thinking more of being able to grok the hardware/software driver interface than the higher-level calls.

Any fellow HN'ers with early insight to how good the Microsoft Kinect SDK extras look?

Still available for $99 at some places.

E.g. http://www.buy.com/prod/xbox-360-kinect-sensor-holiday-bundl...

If you're worried about the cost of Windows and the development tools as part of that, if you're in a startup then it's likely that you qualify for BizSpark where you can get full Windows licenses and copies of Visual Studio for free: http://bit.ly/uBC9Ol

You can't use the Kinect SDK with Linux.

If you're interested in learning more about the driver interface, OpenKinect is FOSS and runs on any platform: http://openkinect.org

As a hobbyist, I'm not sure that's worth the extra $100. I've been considering picking one up to play with.

kinect is highly discounted by most retailers around the year. Though the xbox kinect sells for 149, many places sell it for 99. So you can wait for a few months and hopefully this will get cheaper too

Depending on what you're going to use it for, I would recommend just sticking with the XBox Kinect and either of the major other options: OpenKinect (http://openkinect.org/) or OpenNI (http://www.openni.org/)

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