Blu-ray's Hardware Woes Stacking Up 196
An anonymous reader writes "The bad news just keeps on coming for Blu-ray. First, Sony halved its U.S./Japanese launch shipments of its Blu-ray powered PlayStation 3, blaming a shortage of blue lasers. Then, in the last two weeks, both Sony and Pioneer delayed the releases of their new Blu-ray players, refusing to cite reasons. And this week, at Blu-ray backer LG's annual dealer show, a previously announced LG Blu-ray player was nowhere to be found. LG product development director Tim Alessi had this to say: 'We will provide an announcement when the time is right.'"
Re:OR... (Score:1, Informative)
2) If you still call that proprietary, then HD-DVD is just as proprietary, and is backed primarily by Toshiba.
Re:PS2 DVD vs PS3 Blu-Ray (Score:3, Informative)
There was competition from DIVX. However, once people realized that you could only buy DIVX players and movies at Circuit City, and that you had to pay every time you wanted to watch one, and that you couldn't play your "gold" unlocked discs in any other player except your own, and that DIVX movies didn't come with extra features, etc - people caught on quick.
The problem with HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray is two-fold:
The first issue is that both standards are equally compelling. Each have major studio support, and each can use modern codecs and sizeable capacity to deliver much improved image quality. On the other hand, both standards are plagued by a lack of platforms - while the $500-1000 introduction DVD players looked incredible even on regular TVs of the time, $500-1000 introduction HD disc players only look "better" on HDTVs (%20 or market), and they really only look "incredible" by comparison on 1080p screens (less than %1 of market).