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Blu-Ray Launch Expected Next Week
grammar fascist writes "According to a Reuters article, two Blu-ray players and 'various titles' are expected in stores next week, June 20th. From the article: 'Blu-ray, one of two much-hyped high-definition DVD formats, debuts next week, but the launch is expected to be muted amid device delays and consumer confusion, industry analysts said on Thursday.' On the 20th, Samsung, not Sony, is launching a set-top player (Sony's is due this fall), and Sony is launching a Blu-ray compatible VAIO PC. Sony's fall set-top player will probably cost $1500. No word on the cost of Samsung's player yet, but I wouldn't expect it to be cheap."
There was an article a couple days ago on TGDaily that stated the Samsung's first blu-ray player to be a grand.
I don't know why an article on Slashdot is reporting Sony's to be $1500 when Best Buy is already taking pre-orders for both the Sony BDP-S1 & Samsung BD-P1000 models each equally priced at a thousand dollars. Even the Froogle search for it seems to come out on the one grand consensus.
It seems a lot of articles have been against Sony while this fear of Sony's set top player being overpriced is relatively unfounded. As we all know, this shall prove interesting if the PS3s offer the same functionality for much less.
If both players debut at $1,000, perhaps this will be a war one in quality instead of price? Ah, who am I kidding--whoever licenses pr0n easiest/fastest will come out on top (no pun intended).
I don't intend to run out and buy one because the only movie I've seen advertised for blu-ray is the second Underworld movie. And I don't even know which kind of blu-ray player it's for (customer confusion indeed)!
Just a side note, the same Reuters article is in The Washington Post and I've linked the print format to avoid having to click through pages and view less ads.
My work here is dung.
$999.99
I'm not going to be using it anytime soon, but I noticed the other day that Netflix is starting to roll out their support for blu-ray.
is more significant than VHS to DVD. A full 1080p picture has around 10 times more pixels per square inch than a normal DVD (which is 480p).
While true, thats also pretty meaningless to your average user. Allow me a few bad analogies:
1) You are playing a PC game and are only getting 10fps. You buy an upgrade for $100 to get you 100 fps. Call this upgrade VHS to DVD. Now you also have the option to spend $1000 and get 500 fps. Call this upgrade DVD to HDDVD (Blu-ray or HD-DVD). Between 10 fps and 100 fps, the user will see a huge difference. However, between 100 fps and 500 fps even though there IS a more significant change, very few people would notice it all.
2) You scan a black and white document using a document scanner. You scan it at the following resolutions: 100 dpi, 300 dpi, 1,200 dpi. 100 dpi may do a decent job, but it will be a bit fuzzy and perhaps not always 100% readable. However, in exchange for that it only takes up 10k on your harddrive. The 300 dpi scan is very clear and completely readable and takes 100k of space. The 1,200 dpi scan is also completely readable but not noticably more so than the 300 dpi but it takes 10 MB of space. Which do you want?
The point is with human eye sight there is always going to be a VERY sharp dimminishing returns once you pass a certain resolution because humans just cannot detect the difference. While by the specs the move from DVD to HD could be far more impressive then the move from VHS to DVD, the fact is to the human eye VHS to DVD is a far more significant change because we are able to actually see the difference. While humans can see the difference between DVD and HD, unless we are talking some amazingly large screen the difference between DVD and HD just isn't all that impressive when compared to the VHS to DVD change.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Here is a review:? tag=cnetfd.sd
http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6542126.html
The only thing, though, is that his observation about load times does not seem to match what the people on AVS are saying (some guys in Poland and Greece already have their players, and they are getting 10 second load times).
"100% of the people back in the 80's technically could have bought a DVD player"
Since the first DVD players were released in 1996, they would have "technically" needed time-travel to buy one in the 80's.
It's understandable that he missed CD, considering that it is neither a Sony format nor a closed format.
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Uhh... you are aware, right, that Samsung announced it would build a dual player and was summarily trounced by Sony for violating some obscure section of their license agreement?
Don't hold your breath. Sony has no intention of letting anyone produce systems that will allow HD-DVD to exist.
And that, by the way, reveals their true intentions for creating Blu-ray to begin with, and why it is stuffed chock full of DRM: vendor lock-in. They couldn't care one whit about protecting content.
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