Blu-ray still has a fight on its hands

28 Apr 2008 | 17:01 BST

By Sylvie Barak

DESPITE emerging triumphant in the battle of the high-definition storage format, Sony may still have a way to go to win the war, say boffins from analyst outfit ABI Research.

ABI reckons that because almost 85 per cent of all Blu-ray players are actually PS3s, Blu-ray as a separate video unit, or PC disk drive could take as long as five years to take off.

In a recent report covered by the (cough) Philippine Inquirer, a principal analyst at ABI, Steve Wilson, noted that the fact that so many DVD players (35 per cent) could be "upconverted" to work with high-definition TVs, was a major problem for Blu-ray, especially with the prediction that over the next five years as many as 60 per cent of all DVDs would be upconversionable.

Blu-ray manufacturers, who at least appear to have caught on to the problem, have now started to slash prices in what appears to be a desperate bid to get the market going, even to the extent that computer manufacturers are offering to configure Blu-rays for reduced prices.

But as Wilson points out in his report, “If you're only going to spend $500-600 on a PC, are you really going to spend 40 per cent more for a built-in Blu-ray player?" µ

L’Inq
The Philippine Inquirer

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