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First US indie Blu-ray plant opens

BlueRay Technolgies (BRT), based out of Valencia, California, started last year to provide “next generation DVD/CD replication.” Today they announced their first plant is online. The $12 million plant is located in downtown Spokane, Washington, and BRT is proud to say they’ve already completed their first run of Blu-ray Discs for the independent market.

The facility was a joint venture between BlueRay Technologies and Film and Music Entertainment, an indie film production/distribution company, owned by producer John Daly (The Terminator, Platoon), as a channel for independent filmmakers to distribute their work on the new Blu-ray format. They say this is important because the majority of Blu-ray replicators are controlled by the major studios, and they’re located in Asia. This US based plant will prevent the smaller studios and TV producers from having to wait in the back of the queue.

Neilson says 70% of US homes will have HDTVs by the year 2010. BRT chairman Erik Hansen said, “Driven by the HDTV boom in US households, a growing number of consumers will steadily replace their DVDs with high-definition discs.” Citing the slowing DVD sales, Hansen believes the indie market will have to join with the major studios in adopting high-def formats, saying that high-def will “provide the next boon to film companies large and small as it did when VHS and later, DVDs came to market and created new revenue streams.”

The Spokane plant uses the latest replication technologies and eco-friendly materials supplied by GE Plastics to produce over 100,000 discs per day. Hansen is so confident in high-def content that he plans on buying catalogs and new releases to distribute.

While BlueRay Technologies displays the Blu-ray Disc logo on their page, and says that, “the competition is over - Blu-ray won,” they will be buying HD DVD, though they were very unspecific on what that means.

As an avid indie film fan, this is great news if the studios do take advantage of this. Indie studios will also have the ability to distribute their high-def work through Edge of Light Media. It would be something if BRT became the Criterion Collection of high-def.

Toshiba officially announces 3rd Generation HD DVD players

A few days ago we reported on the possibility of 3rd generation HD DVD players coming soon from Toshiba, after preorder pages were found on Amazon.com. Well now the rumors have been officially confirmed via a Toshiba America press release that was published today. Here is an excerpt from that release.

Building on the success of its first and second generation players, new leading enhancements in select models in the third generation line include an improvement in video performance with 1080p/24 frames per second (24p) support. Movie films are traditionally captured at 24 frames per second and select Toshiba third generation HD DVD players will be able to maintain
this frame rate allowing consumers to enjoy movies in their native frame rate.


Also added to the line is “CE-Link” (HDMI(TM)-CEC) connectivity which offers the capability to communicate with and control another CE device in a whole new way. For instance, using “CE-Link” with “One Touch Play” consumers will be able to turn on a CEC capable HDTV and a Toshiba HD DVD player, and start playing a movie, with a single touch of a button on the player remote.

The three new players are the Toshiba HD-A3 ($299), the HD-A30 ($399) and the HD-A35 ($499). The higher end players will offer features such as 24p support, CE-Link and deep color. All of the new 3G players boast smaller form factors and redesigned looks compared to previous HD DVD standalones. The players will hit the US market in September and October, just in time for the holiday shopping season.

How low can they go?

Just how low will the 2nd generation HD DVD players cost once the new players (3G) hit the market? Definitely less than the 3G player pricing, but who knows how low they can go. One retailer told VideoBusiness that Toshiba plans to offer sporadic $199 HD DVD player promotions throughout the 4th quarter, which should help drive HD DVD sales even more.

New Pioneer Blu-ray player announced

Pioneer just introduced the new Elite BDP-94HD here in the States, and they’re already on the next generation in Japan with the BDP-LX80. This is the first BD player from Pioneer to not be a part of the Elite line.

The initial product photo on the press release looks identical to the BDP-94HD. However, the specs are state-of-the-art. The BDP-LX80 decodes Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio on-board. A new south-after feature is the ability to output the bitstream audio over its HDMI 1.3 output to your next-gen receiver. Because no player has this ability yet, there is no proof decoding on the receiver offers any advantages over using the player’s decoding abilities.



On the video side of things, the Elite BD player is regarded as having the best picture available of any high-def source. This player should follow in that tradition. It will output 1080p/24 via HDMI, as well as up-convert your standard DVDs to 720p/60, 1080i/60 or 1080p/60. Along with the other Elite players, it too features Home Media Gallery which is a DLNA certified media connection to stream video, music and photo files from computers on your home network.

The player is expected in Japan late October, and there is no word yet on if this player will be released in the USA. The player will sell for the equivalent of $1,779 USD.

4x Blu-ray Rewriter Introduced by Pioneer

If you were interested in writing files to expensive Blu-ray Discs, Pioneer has the answer for you. The BDR-202 internal Blu-ray Disc/DVD/CD writer for PC was just introduced in Europe and will make its way to the States soon. Connecting to your PC via SATA 1.0A, the - ahem - industry pioneering drive can read BD-ROM discs, read and write single layer BD-R/BD-RE discs, read DVD-ROM, and read/write to DVD-R/+R, DVD-RW/+RW, DVD-R/+R (double-layer), and CD-R/RW media. It’s a veritable jack-of-all-trades!

While the competing format, HD DVD, is still only offering 1x writable drives, and doesn’t offer anything for rewriting yet, Pioneer’s new burner will write on BD-R at up to 4x speed, and will also rewrite on BD-RE at up to 2x speed. This a significant short-coming for HD DVD, and many people are sure hoping HD DVD will be able to catch up soon - especially with Toshiba claiming all their laptops next year will have HD DVD drives. The speeds of DVD and CD writing on the BDR-202 will be up to 6x for DVD-/+RW, up to 12x for DVD-/+R, and up to 24x for CD-R/RW. Pioneer say the drive’s limited equalizer LSI and a liquid crystal tilt compensator will help with playback of discs. “Ultra DRA” technology is also said to reduce vibrations while burning to a disc.



Currently on sale in Europe for $675 (converted from Euros), the BDR-202 will reach our shores at about $650. Currently write-once BD media is around $15 per disc for 25GB, and rewritable media approaches $25 for 25GB. For extra storage, 50GB media comes in at $45 for -R and $70 for -RE.

This is a significant achievement for Pioneer and the Blu-ray format. However, LG offers a “multi-blue” PC drive that reads both HD DVD and Blu-ray and writes to Blu-ray, DVD and CD which might tickle your fancy a bit more.

3rd Generation HD DVD players arriving in October?

A recent post over at FormatWarCentral has revealed links to Amazon preorder pages, which contained product information about 3 new Toshiba HD DVD player models. These players were listed as the Toshiba HD-A3, HD-A30 and the HD-A35. Pricing on the new models was listed as $299, $399 and $499 respectively.

These Amazon product pages were taken down shortly after being noticed, probably at the request of Toshiba. Speculation also suggests that the full details on these new models will be announced at the CEDIA Expo this September, which takes place in Denver.

It will be interesting to see what if any new features these new 3rd generation HD DVD players bring to the field. On the other hand, these new models could just be due to Toshiba utilizing new manufacturing parts and processes and not so much due to new features.

The size of the players is expected to be a bit smaller, as the 1st and 2nd gen models are significantly larger than most standard DVD players on the market. Personally, my number 1 wanted feature improvement would be for faster startup and disc loading times, as the current generation HD DVD players lag in these areas.

The introduction of these new players will most likely push down the prices of current generation HD DVD standalones, making the jump into HD DVD even more affordable. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any official news on these new models, until then, stay tuned.

Mini Blu-ray Discs, camcorders on their way
Last month I had reported on Hitachi’s Blu-ray camcorder. Today I get to tell you the media for that camera is on its way just in time for the cameras.

Verbatim and Imation are shipping the 8cm 7.5GB Blu-ray Disc to reach the market this month in Japan. The media will not be available in the States until BD-cameras are available here. Verbatim gave a price of $20 each “initially.” Imation has a $24.99 each for -R and $34.99 for -RE (re-writable) discs.

The Verbatim discs are manufactured by MKM (Verbatim’s parent company) in Japan. Imation’s discs will use the TDK Life on Record brand and will be manufactured by TDK.

This mini-BD is an unusual sized disc at 8cm across, and it appears it will only be used in camcorders at this time. The BDA developed this disc specifically for this type of application, much like HDMI’s 1.3 spec includes a mini-HDMI connector for cameras as well. At a 1920×1080 interlaced (1080i) resolution, one disc will hold one hour of continuous video. If you reduce the horizontal resolution to 1440×1080 interlaced, you can get up to two hours. There is some indication that double-sided discs will appear in the future, but nothing has been announced yet. Since they are Blu-ray, they will come with the proprietary hard-coat finish to prevent scratches and dust from accumulating on the surface.



In the US, we should see these BD-cameras coming to market in October. Hitachi has unveiled two BD-cameras for the States. The DZ-BD70A will retail at $1,300 and will utilize the mini-BD. The big brother, DZ-BD7HA, is a hybrid camera with a 30GB hard drive that can hold up to four hours of video where you can edit the content before you burn it to the mini-BD. The DZ-BD7HA will sell at $1,500. Both cameras record in 1920×1080 interlaced video with a 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, and can take stills at 4.32-megapixels stored on an SD card. They also offer 10x optical zoom and HDMI output.

I may have discounted Blu-ray as a camera format, but time will only tell how viable the platform is. It looks like Hitachi is banking on this technology taking off.

“Lost: Season 3″ to land on Blu-ray Dec. 11
At the end of May this year, The Hollywood Reporter reported Disney (parent company of ABC) was going to release Lost: Season 3 on Blu-ray Disc December 11th as a day-and-date with the DVD vesion. Almost as quickly as it was reported, Disney said the studio was not planning to release Lost on Blu-ray. It appears The Hollywood Reporter was right after all. Amazon had listed the set on July 25 with a list price of $124.99 (selling for $86.95). Today, Disney did confirm it will be released with the standard DVD after all.


The complete third season of the hit ABC television series will come on six Blu-ray Discs in full 1080p and featuring an uncompressed PCM 5.1 soundtrack. Among the extra features will be a one-on-one interview with Matthew Fox, audio commentaries with the cast and crew, making of featurettes, bloopers, deleted scenes, never-before-seen flashbacks, and a documentary chronicling the production of the show.

Lost will join Sony’s Rescue Me: The Complete Third Season (Blu-ray) and Universal’s Heroes: Season One (HD DVD) in the growing list of TV programming coming to the high-def formats. Blu-ray and HD DVD are perfectly suited for the new era of high-def programming so we can re-watch the shows the way they originally aired. If you’re like me and you wait for the shows to hit Netflix to watch them, it’s a great bonus.

Note: Box art is not final