There is lots of Blu-ray stuff happening at CES. Here’s a quick rundown.

Sony’s moving away from MPEG2 for their BD releases, and towards AVC. Casino Royale will be an AVC release.

Some more interesting facts:

• Blu-ray has 96% of the HD player market in Japan. “In terms of Japan the game is already over there.”
• Out of 10,000 registered PS3 owners surveyed, 90% have tried and will buy Blu-Ray discs. 75% plan to use their PS3 primarily as a Blu-Ray player.
• On December 20th, Blu-Ray sales finally surpassed HD-DVD sales (note: no word on if this is players or software)

Fox plans to release 7-10 BD titles per month, most being 50GB titles. Buena Vista is big on BD as well. They will release Cards on BD this summer, and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies sometime this year.

CES 2007: Blu-Ray Fights Back!

Edit:

Casino Royale will street on March 13th.
The Pirates movies will debut in May.

We heard last year that Warner Brothers patented some technology to do with creating a hybrid HD DVD and Blu-ray disc. It looks like their hard work is actually going to amount for something, because Warner will introduce its new “Total HD” disc at CES this tomorrow, according to the NY Times. Warner’s Barry M. Meyer says that Warner came up with the Total HD disc when they concluded that neither format would win the format war anytime soon. Warner Brothers is also working on a disc that will include the DVD format as well.

Any more details will have to wait until Tuesday. The biggest question of course is: how many layers? How many HD DVD layers will Total HD support, and how many BD layers? It is vital to the HD DVD camp that the format supports at least two layers, for 30GB of storage. The BD camp would like to see two layers as well, for 50GB of storage, though this is not as vital. Many 25GB BD discs look quite good, and it quality in 25GB discs seems to be more related to the authoring process than to space limitation.

So I eagerly await tomorrow’s announcement from Warner Brothers, and hope to buy some Total HD discs soon.

New Disc May Sway DVD Wars

Surprisingly enough, at least to me, LG’s dual Blu-ray and HD DVD format player has been resurrected, and will actually see the light of day. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think it would happen. But here we are.

LG will be launching the player at the CES show this week. Of course, launching a player and selling a player are two totally different things. LG hasn’t revealed when the player will go on sale outside of a vague “early 2007″.

LG has set the price for their BH100 combo BD and HD DVD player to be $1,199. Not bad considering that these are two new formats and that I just saw a new Rotel DVD (not HD DVD, just DVD) player announced with an MSRP of $300 more.

The player will support 1080p, which is expected. But it will also support DTS HD, which is more rare. Nice to see.

LG to Launch Dual-format Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD Player
LG’s BH100 hybrid Blu-ray & HD DVD player: $1,199
LG’s Dual HDTV Player: The War Isn’t Over

Pictures:

Best Buy LG BH100 Page

On a side note, LG also unveiled a BD burner for the PC that also reads HD DVD discs. That’s an interesting combination. It will record at 4x speed at will retail for less than $1200 in the first quarter of 2007.

LG Unveils New Super Multi Blue Dual-Format Burner

Samsung has announced their second-generation BD player, the model BD-P1200. Remember that Samsung was first to the market with their original BD player, the BD-P1000, which had an MSRP of $999. This new player will support HDMI 1.3, DTS audio (by which I assume they mean DTS HD Master), and will launch in March with an MSRP of $799.

If I remember correctly, you can already get the previous-gen BD-P1000 pictured here for that much if you go deal hunting. But this is the new-and-improved version, of course, so you might like all the new stuff they like to cram in there.

Samsung unveils the first second generation Blu-ray player: BD-P1200

Seems that the competing press releases are starting to come out of the woodwork. Warner Bros. is expected to announce that they have a new disk that will have both (yes both) Blu-ray and HD DVD on the same disk! Also, LG is suppose to announce a player that will play both formats and come out in early 2007.

Warner Readying HD-DVD/Blu-ray Hybrid Announcement for CES DVD HD-DVD Blu-Ray at TheManRoom The Man Room
New Disc May Sway DVD Wars

Dreams Do Come True! LG’s Makes World’s First Blu-ray/HD DVD Dual-Format Player

This was bound to happen with the PS3 20Gig at $499 it was making for quite a cheap (abeit high quality) blu-ray player.

So now Samsung has cut their price by a Benjamin and big box retailers are following with even bigger discounts bringing the player down to the $550ish range. The is great news for blu-ray and consumers. Manufacturers, though are going to start feeling the profit pinch. Hopefully they are finding more efficiencies in their manufacturing processes which will help offset these price cuts.

Samsung Drops Blu-ray Player Price | High-Def Digest

In the “take it with a grain of salt” category.

eproductwars.com shows that blu-ray sales ranks are picking up steam fast and should supplant HD DVD by the second quarter (my guess, not thiers). Anyway it seems that all those people who bought PS3s and finished Resistance now just want to watch movies. Hmmm. I wonder who predicted that one?

HD DVD and Blu Ray sales rank at Amazon
Huge blu-ray sales rank surge at dvdwars part 2 - AVS Forum

I haven’t seen many reviews of the Philips BD player, which is weird. There have been tons on the Samsung player, of course, because it was the first. But the Panasonic and Philips were up next, and I’ve seen some mention of the Panasonic, but not much about the Philips. I guess CNET was reading my mind, because they recently took a gander at the Philips and gave it a 6.3 out of 10, or “Good”.

Basically, the Philips gets knocks for not doing what all the other BD players don’t do. It doesn’t decode TrueHD or DTS HD Master soundtracks. Plus, it’s expensive compared to the PS3 - the Philips goes for an MSRP of $1000, while you can get a PS3 with HDMI 1.3 for $500.

Other than some audio issues, the Philips is an excellent player. The picture quality is very good. It also has a good remote, and good DVD upconversion. So you can’t really go too wrong with this player. Except, well, the PS3 does the same for much less.

Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray Player Review

First PS3, XBox HD DVD Add-On Sales Numbers The PS3 has supposedly sold about 197,000 units in North America at launch. And Microsoft has sold about 42,000 HD DVD add-ons for the Xbox 360.

Blu-ray shot out of the gate like a dead rat. The Samsung player had a problem which made the picture quality well, not so good. Then came the Panasonic and Philips players which were decent, but were a bit high priced, like the Samsung. And the Sony BDP-S1 is too. Actually, the Sony PS3 is the only decently priced BD player out there.

So how does the new Pioneer player fit into all of this? Ultimate AV’s Shane C. Buettner has been really busy recently, just having taken a look at the Sony Pearl and PS3. Now he does a short-take on the Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1.

The Pioneer is a lot like the Sony. Neither plays CD’s. Neither decodes TrueHD or DTS HD Master. But they both play Blu-ray Discs! But the Pioneer also streams media from a PC connected to your home LAN, because the Pioneer has a network port.

So what’s the Pioneer advantage (besides the LAN thing)? The picture quality is fantastic, even on VC1 discs. (I mention that only because they seem to be slightly softer on other BD players than the HD DVD players.) Mr. Buettner even thinks that the Pioneer is worth the $500 premium over the Sony. But at $1500, I find that’s a bit like splitting rat hairs. Once you get into that price range, you know you’re going high end. And what BD really needs now is some affordable players.

Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1 Blu-ray Disc Player: Short Take

Ultimate AV was my favourite print magazine before it went web-only. The PS3 is currently my favourite console, sitting gracefully on the top of my equipment rack. So I ws wanted to know what Ultimate AV thinks of the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, and now I know.

First off, Shane C. Buettner of Ultimate AV notes how gorgeous the PS3 is, and of course I have to agree. Though I thought it was stubbier-looking than I expected, even after seeing tons of pictures.

Note that the PS3 decodes TrueHD to digital PCM, if you wish. Not so with DTS HD Master, however. If you want that track in full glory, you’ll need to use the HDMI 1.3 connector to a receiver or pre/pro that supports DTS HD Master. And…. none of them currently do.

While we’re complaining, the PS3 also doesn’t put out 1080p/24. Not a biggy, but it would have been nice. Note also that the PS3 can’t convert 720p up to 1080i. Which would suck if you had a display that didn’t accept 720p. (Of which there aren’t that many out there.)

But how does the video quality look? In a word: excellent. The PS3 is a very good BD player, which is nice to hear. Because the PS2 was only a mediocre DVD player, so people were wondering if the PS3 would carry the tradition.

Mr. Buettner also points out that 25GB BD + MPEG2 does not equal BAD. That’s what a lot of people have been saying about MPEG2, and it’s simply not true. MPEG2 films can look excellent in 25GB of space, it just needs to be done properly.

All in all, the PS3 is an excellent BD player, and I have to agree with Mr. Buettner on that.

PlayStation3 Blu-ray Disc Player