LaCie, a computer hardware company, has just announced the release of the d2 Blu-Ray Drive. This latest version of the product burns Blu-ray single-layer media discs four times faster than the previous model. The drive records, rewrites and reads 25 gigabytes (GB), 50GB BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable), as well as DVD±RW DL and CD±RW. The d2 Blu-ray Drive also comes with Roxio burning software, allowing users to burn professional-quality media.
Since Blu-ray discs have 10 times the capacity of DVDs, users have the ability to choose much higher bit rate codes when burning content to improve the overall picture quality. The audio qualities can also be manipulated with the Blu-ray drive, with up to eight channels of 92kHz/32 audio streams.
The d2 Blu-ray Drive is available at specialized retails stores, and has suggested retail price of $649.99.
High costs and consumer perception that Blu-ray DVDs are not that much different from normal DVDs has created a dim outlook for the product, according to an article published in the New York Times’ Technology section.
The New York Times reports that a study released from ABI Research revealed consumers don’t really notice the better picture quality Blu-ray DVDs purport to have. The NDP Group (another research corporation) also released sales figures last week showing that the sales of Blu-ray players nosedived by 40 per cent from January to February. Sales managed to recover by 2 per cent from February to March, but this was accredited largely to Toshiba’s decision to discontinue its support for the HD DVD format, according to the New York Times article.
The sales of the Blu-ray DVDs are actually so low that the NDP group hasn’t released the actual numbers in fear that individual retailers would be indentified for low sales. The actual figures will be released later this year, according to the New York Times article.
Another factor in the low consumer interest in Blu-ray DVDs and players appears to be the hefty cost. The price of upgrading a normal DVD player to Blu-ray is around $70, and a brand-new Blu-ray player costs around $300. There also seems to be an inconsistency with the product, as not every player is equipped with Blu-ray all features such as Internet connectivity. The price of the Blu-ray DVD player is expected to drop to around $200 around Christmas time this year, at which time the future of Blu-ray will be more predictable, according to the NDP group.
ABI Research, however, gives Blu-Ray a slightly darker outlook. The research firm stated that Blu-ray won’t be a solid market contender until at least October 2009, according to the New York Times.
According to Business Weekly, Sony has been able to reduce the production cost of the PS3 from $800 in November 2006 when the console launched, to $400.
“We think the biggest factor here is that simplification has become possible through a reduction in the parts count, leading to a reduction in costs,” says Nikko Citigroup’s Kota Ezawa in a December 27th report.
Ezawa estimates that Sony’s gaming division will lose $1.4 billion compared to last years $2.1 billion and doesn’t expect the division to be profitable until 2009.
With the built-in Blu-Ray player playing such a key role in the PS3?s success, sales are expected to pick up since Warner announced that it would release HD movies exclusively on Blu-Ray beginning this summer.
