Blu-ray Drive

With the coast clear for Blu-ray to get a real grip on the next gen disc market, a report by Strategy Analytics Connected Home Devices Services suggests that there will be 29.4million Blu-ray players operating in homes across the globe by the end of 2008.
The figure is based on projected sales this year of 18.8million Blu-ray units, broken down to around four million standalone BD players, 13million PS3s and two million PC-orientated Blu-ray drives.
Coupled with the ongoing transition by consumers to HDTVs, this sales figure is expected to rise to 57.4million BD units by 2012, with more than 132million homes across the globe owning at least one Blu-ray player.

'HD DVD's withdrawal leaves the way open for Blu-ray to become a major revenue earner for technology vendors and content owners alike,' said David Mercer, principal analyst at Strategy Analytics. 'The 265 million homes that will own an HDTV by 2012, and Hollywood's need for a new growth engine, represent huge incentives for the industry to coordinate marketing activities and demonstrate unified support for the successor to DVD'. Strategy Analytics expects the largest Blu-ray market by 2012 to be Europe, with 26.4million BD devices sold that year compared to 22.6million in the US and 8.4million in Japan.

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Sony Launches New Blu-ray Recorders

Sony has unwrapped two new Blu-ray recorders boasting large hard disk drives and the very useful ability to transfer recorded HD material to other Sony products with the simple push of a button.

As usual, they are arriving in Japan first for around £800-£850 apiece. The new recorders, the BDZ-A70 and BDZ-T90, come with 320GB and 500GB hard disk drives respectively, and boast a cool ‘one-touch’ feature that allows content to be transferred to a PSP or video Walkman device via USB.

This is another example of how Sony seems determined to make its key consumer technologies work easily together, like the increasing integration between the PS3 and PSP. We recently heard that PSP owners will be able to copy over their Blu-ray movies to the handheld later this year.

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