Posted on 02/28/2006 10:54:49 AM PST by nickcarraway
Sony Pictures on Tuesday said it aims to deliver its new Blu-ray Disc DVD format to U.S. stores on May 23 to coincide with the entry of compatible disc players, a new step in an industry war for control of home movie viewing.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and MGM Home Entertainment will first release eight Blu-ray titles, followed by another eight in mid-June. The first movie titles include "50 First Dates," "The Fifth Element," "Hitch" and "House of Flying Daggers."
Blu-ray is locked in a multibillion-dollar standards war against a rival DVD format known as HD DVD. The technology companies supporting HD DVD, championed by Toshiba, plan to start rolling out movie titles and disc players in March.
Each side hopes to reignite a sagging $24 billion home video market with new players and discs that offer greater capacity and interactive features.
Sony Pictures Entertainment, a division of Japan's Sony, earlier this month disclosed pricing for Blu-ray format discs, which amounts to a premium of about 15 percent to 20 percent to the current DVD standard.
The company said on Tuesday that its target delivery date would coincide with the launch that day of the first commercially available Blu-ray Disc player by Samsung Electronics. Other Blu-ray players are scheduled for release from Sony and Pioneer.
BetaMax Returns?
Anyone who bought a Betamax is going to wait this one out.
Beta-Max Deja VIEW.........all over again........
At least in this case both disks will fit in the same drive. Wouldn't be surprised to see players come out that can cope with both.
Until they start making movies worth seeing it really doesn't much matter what the DVD format is.
The PS3 (Playstation 3 to you non-gamers :p ) is going to be Blu-Ray based. There has been "issues" with the BR and this is good news, and hopefully means no (or little) delay in the PS3 launch.
(Japan in spring, US in the fall, supposedly)
Nope. In this case, Blu-Ray has most of the momentum and support behind it.
I know -- you two are WAY ahead of me -- like light years - so you probably already knew this...but technology ping anyway! LOL
Pioneer is way ahead of you.
Oh, can it play HD DVD too?
One interesting thing about Blu-Ray titles is that there'll be two versions: one will have just the Blu-Ray movie, and the other will include both the Blu-Ray disc and the movie in UMD format.
Sony is bound and determined to keep UMD movies alive, it seems...
That's the approach finally taken with the DVD reader/writers. I wouldn't buy a DVD drive until I knew it would handle all media I was likely to encounter. Took quite a while before they came along.
Pioneer's working on a player that plays both formats, not to mention all of the others that are floating around right now. (DVD, DVD+R, +RW, -R, -RW, CD, SACD, VCD, etc ad nauseum.)
Right now, it's looking like Blu-Ray will win, but if you're the type to hedge your bets, Pioneer's player should be fine. Personally, I'm going to use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray movie player. It'll be cheaper and work just as well.
The NextGen of video products will have no moving media.......
I hope so...just as it happened with the audio formats SACD and DVD-Audio.
I'm really looking forward to this.Seeing various films in HD on TV has been really fun.Also,the prospect of being able to get stuff from,say,National Geographic in HD would be fantastic.
We're a good long way off from that. We'll see solid state hard drives sooner than we'll see movies shipping on flash carts.
It seems to me I read about a holographic system due in the next year with much higher capacity.
By the time the price drops from $1000 to around $89 the market should have decided and I'll snap one up.
OK...I'll ask: And just what is the advantage/difference of this new disc when compared to HD-DVD??
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