This is getting really tired.It seems like every time we're progressing towards a cheap and easy compromise to the Blu-ray / HD DVD format war hope is quickly snatched away and replaced with a stinging dose of harsh reality. This time the bad news comes courtesy of Digitimes, speaking to various Taiwanese optical disc-drive manufacturers, who reports they are not particularly enthused by NEC's just-announced
dual format chipset. Despite its low cost, the prospect of manufacturing drives with optical heads for both formats and other costs is still too expensive to be worthwhile. The only good news seems to be that they did not rule out the future possibility of multi-drives -- perhaps once
Ricoh's all-in-one laser is finished -- just not yet.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mcloki @ Oct 12th 2006 11:08AM
Face it, Blue Ray, Barring some terrible flaw (scratches ruining disks prematurely) is going to win. You know next year at least 12 million Blue Ray drives will be out there. I don't think that even if the 360 sells 35 million units that they will sell that many add-on HD HVD units.It's just a numbers game.
zargon @ Oct 12th 2006 1:18PM
If you look at everything going on now, I think it is totally the other way around. Barring some major problem for HD-DVD, Blu-ray will go the way of Beta-max, well, maybe more so MD where Sony forces it to stay around even though it is going no where.
HD-DVD has everything going for it right now, price, quality, etc... Blu-ray has been doing nothing but blowing smoke up peoples ass. With HD-DVD lead in this war, I don't think even the PS3 are going to be enough to swing the tables. Studios and hardware manufactures that have claimed sole alliance to Blu-ray are jumping ship or at least playing both sides, which is going to help HD-DVD more than Blu-ray. I expected as much, they are just going where the money is.
Hy-brid players would be nice to see, but if things keep going the way they are. We aren't going to need them as HD-DVD will grab more and more of the studio support (all they need for support is for them to release HD-DVD, even if they do Blu-ray also). We will know when the nail is in the coffin for Blu-ray though, when Sony Pictures and all that encompass it release their first HD-DVD.
This war is not about PS3 vs Xbox 360, Sony is just trying to push their format out by using the PS3. As we have seen thus far, they are only shooting themselves in the foot by doing so, it is one of the reasons with the delays/problems/quantities of the PS3. Though, part of that is also just the Sony hype train biting off way more than it can chew, as usual.
hmurchison @ Oct 12th 2006 12:35PM
12 million Blu-Ray drives. Pray tell where this info is coming from. I'm not sure you really supported your thesis with anything substantive.
Taiwan doesn't have to use the NEC part. There will be enough suitors of this product. NEC doesn't care either way. They have one part that covers both platforms which means they take advantage of economies of scale now.
Juice @ Oct 12th 2006 5:08PM
mcloki
I do agree with you it truely is a numbers game, but your looking at the wrong numbers, studios dont care nearly as much about how many players are out there compared to how many movies are being purchased, sure there will be alot of blu ray players out there, but you have to remember not everyone one of those ps3 owners are going to be buying movies, while any 360 owner who gets a HDDVD drive is clearly getting it for the movies. At the moment HDDVD discs are selling about 3:1 vs blu-ray discs if this continues to the new year, Fox, Disney, and Lions Gate and alot of electronics manufactures would be fools not to jump on the HDDVD train. The truth is that Blu-Ray while it holds more space has no real advantage over HDDVD. 30GB is plenty for any movie in Hi Def and if you really really need those HD extras, they can go on the flip side with the dual sided 60GB HDDVD discs. One move I would like to see HDDVD push though is a much lower price for combo discs, if they could get them cheap enough that the movie studios could realse only one title, with only HDDVD/DVD and no plain DVD, they could really start getting lots of movies out there for consumers to start building a HDDVD collection before they spend the money to get the player. It also makes those discs vary usful in the sense of taking them along in your portable DVD player, laptop or whatever.