According to the HD DVD fan-site campaignhd, the state of Blu-ray (the format in general) is anything but good. Keep in mind that this is an HD DVD site—which may or may not be sponsored by the HD DVD camp—so their complaints might be a little "off." However, they do provide ample links for the statements they make, which makes us take pause and wonder if Blu-ray really is this deep in shit.
Among the observations culled together from separate news stories and "insider intelligence":
• The manufacturing yield rates on BD50 (the 50GB discs) are only 40% from Sony manufacturers and down to 10% yields on non-Sony manufacturers. That means only one in 10 discs made by a non-Sony plant works as a BD50 disc. This in turn leads to higher costs.
• BD1.1 player spec is hard to develop for, leading the only BD1.1 player to be delayed until Q2 2008.
• BD-J, the language they use for special features on discs, is horrible to program for, ...

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Straight from IFA 2007 in Berlin comes Daewoo's surprise entry into the Blu-ray camp with the company's first player, the DBP-1000. Interestingly, even though Daewoo is probably more well-known for their Trutech ODM devices -- or even their autos -- this player supposedly supports the full 2.0 Profile for Blu-ray Disc, including BD Live internet functionality, picture-in-picture, and local storage. Pricing and availability are nowhere to be found, but it won't be soon enough for Blu-ray fans to see players with that interactive functionality built-in like competing HD DVD players have. Another picture after the jump.Continue reading Daewoo shows off Blu-ray Profile 2 player at IFA
 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Today at IFA press day, the BDA gave a presentation running through the status of operations along with studio bigshots from Disney, Warner Bros and Fox. Here's the rundown on what they said:


Announcements
- Hitachi will be making a major Blu-ray announcement tomorrow
- Acer is now a member of BDA
- China's HuaLu Group has joined BDA (major disc manufacturer)
Butt Kickings
- Blu-ray holds 90% market share in Japan for both movies and hardware
- In US Blu-ray has 63% standalone unit market share and over 66% of hi-def disc sales
- 70% of hi-def sales in Europe are Blu-ray with 3:1 ratio over HD DVD
Other Notables
- Sleeping Beauty will be Disney's first "platinum" (classic) movie on Blu-ray.
- Warner Home Entertainment will release as many titles in Q4 of 07 as Q1-Q3 combined. Including Kubrick.
- Spiderman 3 will be released on Blu-ray. I know! Also, Vaio owners who register online will ...

newVideoPlayer("beehype_gawker.flv", 475, 376);The Pitch Everyone who's been wondering what Jerry Seinfeld's been up to—other than cashing syndication checks the size of Tonga's GDP—need wonder no more: Judging by this promo, he's voicing the protagonist in DreamWorks Animation's forthcoming Bee Movie. (And how nice of him to find work for Patrick "Puddy" Warburton, who plays the audio engineer.) In this 30-second snippet, Jerry's bee mightily flaps his wings into a studio microphone, blasting Puddy through a concrete wall and into the ladies loo. How can such a tiny insect achieve such mighty volume? Why, thanks to Dolbee—er, Dolby—Digital technology, as the kick-out logo informs us. Cute, but why is the already ubiquitous Dolby Labs straining to reach the grade-school demographic?
Rip-Off Of Given the kiddie target audience, the first connection I made was with that great The Muppet Movie scene in which Animal fries everyone ears with his roa...

Sony Europe just announced the BDP-S500, a designation that would imply a place between the BDP-s300 and BPD-S1, but the aging high end S1 doesn't have HDMI 1.3, and this one does. It also has the S1's 1080p24/60 for judderless movie playback on supported TVs, x.v.Color, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD decoding and the Spiderman Trilogy. This'll be 699 Pounds in EU, which will probably ~$900 here, I'm guessing.

Now that the first Sub-$200 standalone next-gen DVD player has been announced, we thought it would be a good time to see how many of you have actually jumped into the next-gen DVD pool. Do you own either a Blu-ray player or an HD DVD player? And if not, will this change your mind? Let us know in the poll and in the comments.
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Is this it? The HD DVD stake into Blu-ray's heart that will signal a start to the resolution of these next-gen DVD format wars? We tracked down a price on the upcoming Venturer HD DVD player and discovered it to be $199, the magical price that everyone's been waiting for.
The SHD7000 will play back HD DVDs at 1080i, support Dolby TrueHD have HDMI output. It's fairly similar in functionality to Toshiba's low-end DVD player, but since it's from China, Venturer's able to cut the price down to the sub-$200 point. If Wal-Mart gets ahold of this by the 2007 holidays, well, it's going to be hard for Blu-ray to recover. [Venturer]

I'm already a huge fan of DVD-projector combos, so Epson's new LCD-projector MovieMates make me titter like a school girl. The first thing Epson did was solve its size problem with the MovieMate 50. The new one is 63% slimmer than its predecessor—with a built-in handle!—yet still costs $799. But the inevitable shift to high-def has happened earlier than I would have predicted, with the advent of the MovieMate 72.
If you haven't already guessed it, the 72 refers to 720p. It's not a full 1080p, but a big step in the right direction, and at $1,199, hard to pass up. When you're projecting an image 100 inches across, it's all too easy to see the screen-door effect of the pixels from a 480p-resolution chip. The jump to 720p triples the number of pixels. With the requisite internal DVD upscaling, the image remains a lot smoother when you project it big. Also, since there's an HDMI input, you'd be able to play games and watch Blu-ray or HD DVD movies at a much improved reso...

If you thought that Eight HD DVD + Toshiba Player deal this morning was good, check out this Blu-ray + PS3 deal Amazon's also got going. It's the same idea: get a 60GB or 80GB PS3, pick three Blu-ray movies from the list of 105, and get the movies for free. You can then mail in for an additional five movies, just like you can with HD DVDs. Everybody wins! [Amazon]

Here's some leaked photos of Dell's higher-end gaming laptop. The M1730 XPS laptops not only come in four colors—"Karmosin Red", Sapphire Blue, Bone White and Smoke Grey—but feature a gigantic shell, Core 2 Duo processors, NVidia GeForce Go 8700M GT graphics cards, Blu-ray drives, and 4GB worth of ram inside. These are all optional packages, so don't think you'll be forced to buy all that if you only want to play some World of Warcraft on the go. More photos at Laptopspirit. [Laptop Spirit]