Sony signals Blu-ray blitz at Vegas show
Sony and its collaborators within the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) are to debut a raft of consumer electronics hardware featuring GaN-based blue lasers over the next few months in the US.
Revealing details at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) being held in Las Vegas, the Japanese company said that its first Blu-ray Disc home player, the BDP-S1, will become available in "early summer". Samsung plans a similar launch in "early spring", while Pioneer is aiming for June and Philips the second half of the year.
Sony maintains that its PlayStation 3 game system, which is set to use Blu-ray technology, will also launch in 2006, although this is now likely to mean the end of the year rather than spring as originally intended. Sony's high-end range of Vaio computers will also feature the new format.
The US launch of both Blu-ray and the rival high-definition (HD) DVD hardware was originally slated for late 2005, but a variety of problems, including very poor yields from the semiconductor wafers on which the blue lasers are manufactured, appeared to cause a delay to that schedule.
Toshiba, Sony's key rival in the HD DVD camp, also unveiled its first players for the US market at CES. It will beat Sony to market in the US with a launch date currently set for March.
That date is expected to tie in with the release of around 50 movie titles in high-definition format from big Hollywood studios, although Blu-ray proponents claim that copy protection and licensing issues will negate any time-to-market advantage that HD DVD might initially appear to have gained.
Toshiba's players will be available from the standard US retail outlets for only $500, a very low price point for the introduction of new optical data storage technology compared with previous generations of DVD hardware.
If that attracts large numbers of US consumers then GaN fabs will need to ramp up wafer production and solve laser yield issues to meet demand.
Software giant Microsoft, whose chairman Bill Gates opened CES with a keynote presentation, could add significantly to that demand with plans to offer an external HD DVD drive for use with its popular new games console, the Xbox 360, later in the year.
