May 03 2008
XBox 360 getting Bluray Drive
It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that the Microsoft guys were dead-set against any talks with Sony about bringing the BluRay drive to their console system. They seemed to have an “over my dead body” stance on the issue, but Steve Balmer admitted that the console will be going blue this year.
The drives will begin manufacturing very soon and will be shipped in the third quarter of this year. I suspected that Microsoft would realize that there’s money to be made and regardless of their rivalry with Sony, they’re a company and they want to make money.
This all comes out at a rather ironic time though. A piece of news surfaced about the fact that BluRay players and disks aren’t selling as fast as people had hoped for and many consumers claimed they couldn’t tell the difference between DVDs and BluRay.
Haha. I had to laugh at that because on my tiny 20″ LCD monitor, I can tell the difference. I can’t imagine what BluRay on a 40+ inch HDTV would look like. DVD is a great format. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of VHS, but consumers will eventually come around. Because of BluRay, I have stopped purchasing movies on DVD. I’m frankly holding my cash for TV shows on DVD which I know won’t see BluRay releases for years [if ever] and will buy the others when BluRay players and movies become affordable. Players currently cost over $300!
One of the big problems is that there are still three different versions–or tiers–to the blu-ray format. And it won’t be until about next year that things finally get sorted out and prices come down. That’s why I haven’t bought one, and the prices are way too high on the discs for my taste.