UK consumers may be taking their time jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon so maybe Sony′s latest Blu-ray players, sporting Wi-Fi and sensible price tags will help them make the leap. The company has just announced its new BDP-S360 and the BDP-S560 [above], the latter coming with integrated 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity to make updating firmware and accessing Web content a snip. They both offer full 1080/60p and 24p True Cinema Output and support for the latest HD audio formats like 7.1-channel Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio. They are Profile 2.0 players with support for Internet-based BD Live content, like trailers, extra content and games.The BDP-S560 uses Wi-Fi Protected setup, which promises simple connection to your wireless router and it also supports DLNA, for easy communication and file swapping with other DLNA-certified products. However, despite the inclusion of Wi-Fi the player does not support content streaming from your PC, for instance, which new players from Samsung and others do. Still, there’s always the price to look forward to as the BDP-S360 and the BDP-S560 are priced at $300 and $350 [US first], respectively, so will be in the £215-250 ballpark when they arrive this summer. Oh, what a difference a year makes.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies sony

Blu-ray players might be common now in the UK but so far no one has opted to combine Blu-ray playback and recording with HDD recorders. Until now, that is. Hot on the heels of launching a raft of new Viera LCD and plasma TVs, Panasonic has released details of its DMR-B𔞊, which will feature a 500GB hard drive alongside a Blu-ray player and recorder. There will also be a smaller version, the 250GB B𔜦. Both machines will utilise Panasonic’s PHL Reference Chroma Processor and the players will support BD-Live and BonusView. The new models sport twin Freesat HD tuners meaning you should - barring any copyright issues - be able to record HD broadcasts from the BBC and ITV. There’s DV connections for transferring camcorder video, alongside SD Card and USB slots so that you can archive or playback AVCHD HD video. Both will offer support for Viera Cast, which is Panasonic’s new Internet content delivery service, allowing viewers to access sites like Eurosport and YouTube. No price nor launch date for the new machines yet but we’ll keep you posted.-Martin Lynch [Trustedreviews] blu-ray HDD

Blu-ray has yet to shine as the HD movie format of choice for many consumers but according to market watcher Futuresource Consulting, HD fans around the globe will buy more than 100m of them within the year. Despite the recession, increased sales of HDTVs combined with cheaper Blu-ray players will drive sales of Blu-ray movies in Western Europe, the US and Japan. The UK already leads the way as the largest Blu-ray disc market in Europe, racking up 3.5m sales in 2008 - a whopping 40% of the European total. Worldwide, The Dark Knight led the Blu crusade with massive sales. “In the USA, BD has moved from early adopter phase through to early majority, with the format gaining real traction in the marketplace,” says Mai Hoang, Senior Market Analyst at Futuresource Consulting. “Last year in the US alone, BD video retail sales increased by a whopping 320% to 24 million units; and we’re going to see momentum continuing in 2009, with over 80 million disc sales forecast.” She added: “The UK is the largest market for BD in Western Europe. With sales of more than 3.5 million units in 2008, it represented over 40% of the West European total. BD also benefited from a number of UK television campaigns during the critical fourth quarter of 2008, considerably raising consumer awareness. Factor in Sky’s high profile approach to marketing its HD service, and to a lesser extent the BBC/ITV joint venture, Freesat, and the cumulative effect has made a substantial impact upon the marketplace.” Even though HD movie downloads are on the horizon, Futuresource does not see it threatening the overall uptake of Blu-ray. “Looking at the hardware, retail prices are declining fast and we’ll see BD players become ‘impulse buys’ very soon, powering the format’s momentum through the diffusion curve,” says Alison Casey, Head of Global Content at Futuresource. “Although movie downloads are making noises in the marketplace, mainstream adoption will be a much more gradual process, with our projections showing that 12% of US consumer expenditure on home video will originate from online in 2012, with a slightly lower proportion in Europe.” Still, it will be years before DVD is dethroned as the dominant movie disc format. According to Futuresource, by 2012 around 50% of US and 35% of Western European video disc retail sale volumes will be Blu-ray.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies

With the price of Blu-ray players dropping all the time, Sony can′t rely on selling a healthy amount of Ṕs by appealing to HD enthusiasts for much longer. Rather than follow Microsoft’s lead by dropping the price of the console it looks like it will be attempting to merge the future of gaming and movies by supplying them both on the same disc. The company is currently working on making the most of Blu-ray’s 50GB capacity by basically burning the equivalent full-length feature film to the empty space on a game-disc, which typically only uses around 30GB. Director of hardware marketing John Koller thinks it’s the future of entertainment, saying that “We are actively pushing, and the way that we see the future is that the movie and the game are placed on the same disc. There are a lot of developers who say, we have this game based on a movie, wouldn′t it be great to marry these concepts? We will definitely see this stuff this year.” Sony seems to be forgetting the fact that the vast majority of ‘movie-based’ games are fairly rubbish, in which case it’ll be appealing to a rather small collection of fanboys for many of the titles that get chosen. Interesting idea, but not something that we′d consider particularly revolutionary. Paul Lester [VideoBusiness] Ṕ Blu ray Sony

There’s more talk of 3D today, following Sky’s recent trials of 3D TV. Panasonic is looking to bring the technology to the optical disc, announcing a new 3D authoring laboratory at its Hollywood offices in California. This will boast a full home theatre system with a 3D-ready projector offering a 380″ screen. A 3D plasma display, digital projector and MPEG4 decoder are in the works and it is in talks with major studios to make ‘3D Full HD’ Blu-ray formats an established standard, which it plans to launch next year. Managing Director Eisuke Tsuyuzaki enthuses about the new setup and outlines its plans for the future: “Panasonic recognizes that for 3D FHD to succeed, just like Blu-ray, collaboration on research, development and production with studios and content providers is absolutely essential” he stated. “The creation of the new PHL Authoring Center will enable Hollywood to start trial production and ultimately create commercially available 3D FHD titles to realize a new window into reality, and elevate the level of High Definition entertainment that consumers can enjoy in their own homes.” - Paul Lester [HDTVOrg] Panasonic 3D Blu-ray|

We’re pretty sure that blank Blu-ray discs will never be as popular as blank DVDs, largely because of the heart-stopping price. After all, why bother backing up your movies to blank Blu-ray discs that cost almost as much than the original Blu-ray movie? Hmm, maybe that’s how the movie studios plan to crush piracy…. Still, there are more legal uses for blank Blu-ray discs [HD video, document back-up] which is why some folk will be interested in the new external Blu-ray burner from style-storage outfit, LaCie. The d2 External Blu-ray Burner doubles the speed of burning to 8x on both single and dual-sided Blu-ray discs. That’s means you can cram up to 50GB of data - or 4 hours of HD video - on a single [dual-sided] disc. The authoring and back-up software has also been upgraded. The drive sports FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces and is compatible with Macs and PCs.. “With the doubling of the speed to burn Blu-ray discs, video professionals will be able to spend more time creating content and less time on production,” said Christelle Dexet, Multimedia Product Manager for LaCie. “And for those who need to safely store large quantities of information for extended periods of time on secure removable media, the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive is an ideal solution.” The d2 comes bundled with the newly revised Easy Media Creator 10 and Toast 9 Titanium software. It’s shipping now and costs *ouch* £390. There’s another reason why Blu-ray burning might never take off.-Martin Lynch blu-ray peripherals storage

The gaming sector has experienced strong hardware and software sales while many other consumer electronics sectors are swirling around the toilet bowl but the latest research shows that games have outsold DVDs [and Blu-ray] globally for the first time. According to market watchers, Media Control GfK International, games accounted for 53% of the $61bn ‘global packaged media commodities’ sales in 2008. DVD and Blu-ray sales accounted for 47%. And it’s no fluke either as the company expects games to account for 57% of the pie in 2009. Sales of videogame software topped $32bn in 2008, a jump of 20% over 2007. On the other hand, DVD and Blu Ray Sales dropped by 6% to $29.8bn. The two key reasons for the shift in balance….. …are the enormous success of the Nintendo Wii, while the home movie market is being stalled by the very slow transition from DVD to Blu-ray. The US market drove the global decline of DVD sales, with combined DVD/Blu-ray sales falling by off by 8%, compared to a decline of just 3% in Europe and 4% in Asia. The US share of worldwide sales was 43% in 2008, down from 45% in 2007. The US market is 3 times bigger than the UK, the second biggest marketplace. Have you spent more on games than movies in the past year?-Martin Lynch games movies dvd blu-ray

While mainstream consumers await even cheaper Blu-ray players, AV fans will no doubt like to drool a little over the new BDP-L⊻ flagship Blu-ray, CD and DVD spinner from Pioneer. This heavyweight comes with more top class technology crammed in than an electronics store and has a heavyweight price tag to prove it. Touted as a reference-quality Blu-ray deck, it’s a Profile 2.0 Blu-ray player that weighs in at 14Kg and has been built using a solid aluminium chassis to reduce vibration. It sports dedicated audio and video boards and gold-plated terminals. There’s a 48-bit video processor and the BDP-L⊻ supports not only 48-bit HDMI Deep Colour, but also x.v.Colour for even deeper shades of eye candy. There are 8 Wolfson Digital Audio Converters (DACs) for superior audio decoding and the deck supports the latest Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats. It has an unprecedented 4GB of onboard storage for BD Live downloads and firmware updates, an Ethernet jack and 2 HDMI ports. There’s also a wide array of traditional AV connectivity options too. You can check out a review from HCC here and if you’re still interested, just toddle off to your bank and warn the manager that you’ll be needing £1,699 really soon. Or, you can opt for Sony’s flagship Blu-ray wallet-buster, the BDP-S5000ES, which we played with here.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies

Those who debate whether the future of digital media is in Blu-ray or digital downloads (if indeed these people exist) have been offered an alternative by the head of Samsung’s visual display division, Kyung-shik Lee. He paraphrases the immortal words of a certain Mr. George Bush in stating that ‘I believe Blu-ray and digital downloads can co-exist together peacefully′ before going on to say that it’ll be adding storage to future Blu-ray players for just this purpose.Combination devices do indeed seem to be the way forwards, and Samsung is looking to merge things like high-def disc players, web access and TVs as well as making data accessible between a range of other devices like mobile phones and personal computers. “Our strategy is an open platform. We welcome anyone who wants to put content. Yahoo has a very good solution with the Yahoo Widget Engine” he says. “Our idea is to get content to customer [including] any digital device; mobile phone, personal computer. From last year we started to implement DLNA technology [in our TVs], and last year we were wired. From this year we are supporting wireless DLNA technology for the TV and Blu-ray player, [allowing you to] transfer content wirelessly very easily.” Andy Parsons of the BDA makes a similar claim, suggesting that downloads are more for temporary content such as movie rentals. He says that they are not harming package delivery, which will sell around $20 billion a year in the US compared to $5 billion worth of downloads. They may well be right, but we still reckon that given the right container, digital downloads would have a substantial impact on the sale of boxed products just for their sheer convenience. Do Gizmodo readers reckon that Blu-ray/DVD will die out completely in the foreseeable future? - Paul Lester [TechRadar] Blu-ray digital media home cinema

You might not believe it but some LCD TV makers at CES 2009 are not launching super-skinny LCD TVS. Why? Because those like Sharp are launching new tellies with in-built Blu-ray players. These are the world’s first AQUOS LCD TVs with in-built Blu-ray and comprise of 52in, 46in, 42in, 37in and 32in models with the slot-loading player situated on the top right. And yes, you can see that this makes the TV thicker than many LCDs but we think most folk aren′t all that bothered, nor can afford, the current crop of cutting edge, anorexic LCDs. Bob Scaglione, senior vice president and group manager, Product and Marketing Group, Sharp Electronics Corporation, commented: “We created this series to offer consumers a product that provides the same high-quality, clear picture they′ve come to expect from a Sharp AQUOS, but with the added convenience of a Blu-ray player for a unique combination solution that allows playback of the latest HD Blu-ray movies. This product is a one-stop, stylish home theater and the built-in side-loading Blu-ray slot is also a space-saver for style-conscious consumers, eliminating the need for a separate box and extra cables.” The AQUOS BD Series support instant-on and shut down when a disc is placed or removed from the player - a feature now becoming common of many new generation TVs. The TVs launch in February and prices [US for now] range from $1,100 to $2,600. In-built DVD players never sold more TVs so I’m not sure that TVs with in-built Blu-ray players will fly either. What’s your take?-Martin Lynch TV blu-ray HDTV