Get the stories!  Or just the comments...

• Home
  • Top
  • Archives
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Sites We Like
• About & Contact
• Datefinder
• Buy J-Gadgets!
• Snapp! PR
• Advertise!

Sales of Blu-ray disks and hardware may not be quite as perky as manufacturers had hoped, but at least one firm is reminding us that the technology is good for more than just high-def copies of bad action movies.

Sharp has just announced what we all knew was coming sooner or later – the world’s first TV sets with built-in Blu-ray recorders.

We don’t have any photos of this for you yet and if we did it wouldn’t really help, so it’s going to have to suffice if we tell you that Panasonic claims it has just created the world’s first 3D HD plasma home cinema system.

When it comes to consumer electronics, Japan is generally an excellent weathervane for forecasting the picture in the West a few months ahead. With that in mind, the latest electronics sales figures suggest a balmy Fall lies ahead.

Anyone familiar with the conservative nature of big Japanese business will tell you that Toshiba’s decision to drop HD DVD like a hot brick was almost unseemly in its haste, even though the firm had little choice.

One of the marketing bigwigs behind Blu-ray has gone public with an astonishing claim that Toshiba has only itself to blame for the flop that was HD DVD.

Amid the rush to wring the last few pennies out of HD DVD’s rancid and yellowing corpse, at least one retailer has had the decency to front up and look after its unfortunate customers.

Should you happen to be one of those people who arranges the books on their shelves alphabetically, you’ll probably like the new recordable media from Panasonic that allow you to record the summer Olympics on Olympic-branded disks.

We saw recently how Japanese sales figures for high-definition video recorders make worrying reading for the backers of HD DVD, so it’s no surprise that the latest data on the market for players and recorders as a whole shows more of the same.

It’s hard to know what to make of the latest statistics on the battle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD DVD because of the fact that they’re from Japan, home of so many of Blu-ray’s biggest backers. Nevertheless, the degree to which HD DVD has fallen behind in Japan in sales of the crucial high-end HD TV recorders is stark.

Just two weeks after we caught whiff of a rumor that Hitachi would be releasing a Blu-ray camcorder in the fall, the Japanese company has announced that the portable high-definition technology is, in fact, ready now.

After what seems like years of waiting and fiddling around with AVCHD and the like, it seems the world is finally about to get a real next-gen HD video camera after Hitachi’s late-afternoon Tokyo announcement of the first Blu-ray camcorder.

As expected, Samsung today announced that it will join LG in releasing a dual-format high-definition video player that supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD.