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Samsung Bets All on Blu-Ray Player

PostPosted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 9:16 am
by RJW
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/200 ... 411880.htm
Samsung Electronics is going to give its full support to Sony’s Blu-ray drive in the competition with Toshiba’s HD-DVD platform to help it become the next-generation standard.
``Samsung is going all-out for Blu-ray. We were the first one to market the Blu-ray player,’’ David Steel, vice president of Samsung Electronics, told The Korea Times in fluent Korean on Friday. Steel is the global marketing executive for digital appliances.

Steel also said that Samsung has no plan to develop HD-DVD players or combo devices, which support both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD platforms. A public relations official of Samsung confirmed it on Monday.

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are high-density optical disc formats. They are competing to become the industrial standard expected to replace the DVD platform as early as next year.

It is the first time Samsung has admitted that it has completely shifted to the side of Blu-ray. Though it has been a main member of the Blu-ray team composed of global companies such as Sony, Apple, Hitachi, Sharp and Philips, the Korean company had said that it could sell HD-DVD devices as well in the future.

In September, LG Electronics, Samsung’s domestic rival, decided to abandon HD-DVD development plans.
The Blu-ray side is led by Japan’s Sony. But it was Samsung that introduced the world’s first Blu-ray video player in June in the United States. It cost $999. It is competing with Toshiba’s HD-DVD player, which is being sold for $499.
The commercialization of Blu-ray players has been slow in South Korea. The official launch was Sept. 1, but sales have been insignificant because of a lack of movie titles, Steel said.

``I think the market will expand when Sharp and Sony follow Samsung in producing Blu-ray players,’’ he said.

The Blue-ray technology uses a blue-violet laser beam to read and write to the disc. It can store up to 25 gigabytes of information on a single disk, about five times more than a DVD.

In comparison to HD-DVD, Blu-ray discs have more information capacity per layer but are more costly to make.

Steel, from Britain, joined Samsung in 1997 after earning a doctorate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He is now in Singapore to make presentations to investors.