Samsung Gives a Boost to Blu-ray

Samsung is going to be a step ahead of its competetion by becoming the first manufacturer to launch a Blu-ray disk player in April this year.

The company made an announcement to this effect at the International Consumer Electronics Show here at Las Vegas.

Toshiba is planning to launch two players that support HD-DVD, the competing format to Blu-ray Disc, sometime this year.

The BD-P1000 player will cost $ 1000 and will be able to output high-definition video on an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) at 720p and 1080i (720 lines progressive scanning and 1080 lines interlaced scanning) resolutions. That’s the same as the Toshiba players and means that both first-generation high-definition optical disc players won’t be able to output a signal at 1080p, which is considered the best of several high-definition picture standards.

"It allows us to get to market quicker, and so as we look at future models we’ll look at 1080p output," Jim Sanduski, senior vice president of marketing for Samsung Electronics America’s digital and audio products group, explained to reporters at CES.

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.

"There’s no question that a format war is not a good idea," Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Corp., said this week. Sony is a developer and backer of the Blu-ray format.

Blu-ray discs will have the larger capacity, at 25 gigabytes or more. The HD DVD will have the virtue of being more similar to regular DVDs, which simplifies production, according to its backers.