Blu-ray is on the road

[Ghianni]

I received the following and I reproduce it here for your information.

Ghianni.

""Samsung likely to beat others to U.S. market with Blu-ray disc player

Jun 20, 2006 12:33 PM



Retail availability of the first Blu-ray disc player in the United States is scheduled for June 25, according to an announcement last week from Samsung Electronics America.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->

Shipments to retailers of the BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc player have already begun. The commercial availability will come on the heels of Sony’s announced delivery of the first seven movie titles available on Blu-ray Disc.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->

Sony announced last week that “50 First Dates," "The Fifth Element," "Hitch" and the "House of Flying Daggers" will be available June 20 in the Blu-ray format. LionsGate Pictures is also expected to release Blu-ray content in June.

The Samsung BD-P1000 plays Blu-ray software titles at native 1080p and offers HDMI output for films digitally mastered in 1920 x 1080p. The BD-P1000 also up-converts conventional DVDs to 1080p through the HDMI digital interface.""

[Netlist]

Thank you for the information.
I would however be more interested in some technical aspects of blu-ray. Can you share a bit about them?

/Hugo

[pinkmouse]

Give it five years, once the kit is reasonably priced and the format wars sorted, and I might be interested.

[Ghianni]

I found also this: http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/04/b...lu-ray-player/

Ghianni.

[phn]

No way people are going to pay $1,000 for a Blu-ray player when they can get a perfectly good DVD player for $50.

I predict we are going to see 42-inch HD plasma screens at around $1,000 this Christmas. Lots of plasma screens are going to be sold. For Sony to take advantage of that and not get steamrolled by Toshiba, the players have to be priced reasonably. I don't think anyone will be in a hurry to upgrade from "good enough" HD to Blu-ray. Then Blu-ray will be another Betamax or SACD--superior formats nobody cares about today, if anyone even remembers them.

A normal company would have learned from the Betamax and SACD fiascos. But Sony seems to be unable to learn from mistakes. It doesn't seem to play by the same rules as other companies. I'm not sure Sony even plays with a full deck. It has to be the most schizophrenic company on the planet.

[mr-mac]

Worth mentioning (along with sony's failures some things they may have got right).....

erm CD

PSone
PStwo
good TV's

Betamax was better but they lost out on price in the end but did sony loose out on price over SACD? No... but then DVD-A did no better either.

I think $1000 for the veyr first player is very good (how much was the first CD player and in what year?, how much was the first DVD, LD, DAT, VCR???)

I would even guess the $1000 is probs the cheapest 1st product out of them all....

And they won't stay at the price for long at all...

Loads of people have spent a lot more on Plasmas, LCD's etc. that are HD ready... I am sure it will come down to who is 1st out, then which has best/most films then a price war on players....

John

[rfbrw]

Wee small point. Blu-ray does not compete with the HD-Plasma screen. It competes with the HD-DVD player and I don't see many of those for $50.

[phn]

The reason I call Sony schizophrenic is that it has been more innovative than perhaps any other company in the post war era. The Sony and Philips laboratories are were the action is. Because of that Sony is also the company that makes ME look schizophrenic. I generally don't like multi-national companies. But I love much of what Sony and Philips do.

Then Sony does crap like installing spyware on people's computers and you can't but hate it. When they got busted they offered a program that uninstalls it, only it installs another spyware! That makes Sony a sleazy company, and a company which products I cannot support. In fact, I want nothing to do with companies, or people, of that kind. I would consider it a moral victory if Sony went bankrupt. There's no excuse for being a sleaze. It's a choice.

While a $50 DVD player isn't an alternative to a $1,000 Blu-ray player, there's no difference until you have a HD TV set. (I only started to hate my roughly 400 DVD-5 discs after I got a plasma screen.) The "good enough" HD DVD player costs $500. And the HD DVD will work on your PC and is backed by Microsoft.

Edit: My point wasn't that the Blu-ray competes with a TV set. That would be stupid. The point was that when people go HD en masse, there's going to be a demand for HD formats. And the format that gets the upper hand, as VHS over Betamax, is likely to keep it.

[rfbrw]

Sony is as much multiheaded as multinational. Ask the Vaio people what a C800G is and the odds are they wouldn't have a clue. There is an entire semiconductor division even though other parts of Sony appear to have their own semiconductor fabrication agreements, if not their own facilities. And it can only be a matter of time before the PS1/2/3 mob, SCE are spun off as a standalone entity.

The difference between discs and cassettes is that one player can play all discs so you end up with the current system that sees DVD-x,y and z co existing and as Sony owns a pretty large amount of content the universal player will probably save the day.

[Schaef]

Just a couple of things on this:

First, while the Samsung unit is $1000, which may seem cheap for a first product, the HD-DVD player is $500, as a first product. (I don't remember the manufacturer off the top of my head)

Second, the Samsung unit won't play dual layer blue-ray disks without a firmware upgrade.

Third, we're back in the stupid format war, no one's going to win. I agree with Pinkmouse, wait. At least let the studios get more than a handful of movies out the door.

Of course, to put all of this into perspective, I own a 27" tube non-HD TV, and a cheap Samsung DVD player, so I'm not exactly cutting edge on that front.