It looks like Samsung may not be the only manufacturer to squeeze out a Blu-ray player this summer. Sony has a target release date of August 15, 2006 for its $1000 blu-ray player. Sounds like a lot of money…but wait…you get a free DVD: The Fifth Element! Nothing like suppling a movie that was released almost 10 years ago!
Judging by the price tag I wouldn’t think that there would be too many early adopters for this player, but I am sure there will be plenty of people that fork out the money to stay on top of technology. Oh yeah, and the scheduled release date is only a “target date”, so if they are anything like Microsoft then we shouldn’t expect to see this until sometime in 2007.
HD-DVD ftw, tbh. It’s already more supported, early adopters already use it, meaning it will sell more and more people will use them. Blu Ray is nice, I’m looking forward to its arrival but I reckon it won’t be that much more succesful than the UMD.
how about a nice reply for once, there will be no war, in a year we’ll get to see players being Blu-ray and HDDVD capable. Just like the DVD-R and DVD+R are now. Even if they find HDDVD to be cheaper right now when they’ll need more data storage for interesting features they’ll move onto blu-ray and in 5 years no one will even remember that low class tech called HD-DVD.
Hmm, the multi-format thing is interesting – from what I can gather the technologies, whether for licence or physical reasons wouldn’t be able to act alongside in one player, but it would be interesting to see if that happened.
And at the moment the storage capacities are within a few gigabytes. I’ve just seen Sony’s two previous attempts to create a format (Betamax and UMD) and both have been unsupported by everything except Sony, forced more spending by consumers and eventually been retired.