Ok, ok, you found me out, I'm an anti-Blu-ray subversive (actually, I'm anti spending over $300 on a movie player but that's neither here nor there). Just so everyone knows there is no bad blood between Blu-ray and HD Beat we've got some good news to report.

A small company called Blue Ray Technologies claim they have solved production issues with Blu-ray disc manufacturing that have lead to as much as a 75% defect rate, and lower that to 25%, drastically cutting costs. We'd love to take these guys seriously but in light of Nintendo's Wii, wii're taking naming very seriously and adding an E to the end of the technology does not cut it. Also, if current failure rates are at 75% for disc replicators, we don't want to see anyone's face when their $47 TDK dual-layer Blu-ray BD-R makes a coaster, ouch. However if they can really help get prices down we're all for it.

Also, TDK has issued a release that they have developed a prototype 200GB Blu-ray disc that uses six 33GB layers to hold data. Sounds interesting; hopefully we'll see production versions soon.

See? We can say nice things about Blu-ray...even though it's not out yet and delays make us very very angry.

[Via CDRinfo & Newlaunches thanks for the tip!]