After the recent switch to Blu-ray, Paramount have named further titles due to be released. The following titles are due for the 20th May 2008:
Paramount has finally and officially confirmed the details of its Blu-ray plans by confirming titles which will be released in June. Paramount has said in a statement:
“Paramount Home Entertainment continues to focus on the consumer and to explore avenues that allow fans to get more out of their home entertainment experience,” said Kelley Avery, President of Worldwide Home Entertainment, Paramount Pictures. “We will have a strong slate of titles for Blu-ray release throughout the year worldwide and are enthusiastic about expanding the format’s offerings for a broad consumer audience while delivering an experience that goes beyond what viewers love about DVD.”
Titles confirmed so far are: Face Off, Next, Bee Movie, Cloverfield, There Will Be Blood & The Spiderwick Chronicals.
This is all great news for the Blu-ray camp.
Sony has introduced two new models to this Blu-ray player line, these are the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 and come with some brand new new features. Both players support BonusView (Picture-in-Picture) and the BDP-S350 model is BD-Live ready featuring an Ethernet port for an easy firmware updates and access to Internet-based interactive content features. Both models also feature an external port for local storage, so users can add optional flash-based memory. The BDP-S550 comes with a 1GB storage device.
Chris Fawcett, vice president of marketing for Sony Electronics says “Building on the exceptional picture and sound quality of previous players, Sony´s next-generation Blu-ray Disc models bring exciting interactive features to life and offer consumers a ground-breaking experience. These new devices bring home movie experience beyond the cinema and into a whole new realm of entertainment.”
There was a fair bit of controversy after a Reuters article claimed that Microsoft would be supporting Blu-ray in future versions of the Xbox, however, Microsoft has now quashed these claims.
A Microsoft spokesperson has made a statement confirming “There was a critical element of our comments missing from the story — Microsoft currently has no plans at this time to consider Blu-ray as an option. We continue to believe that HD DVD is the best optical solution for consumers, since it’s the only format today that delivers quality experiences at affordable prices.”
The spokesman also stated “While the article states that Microsoft might possibly look into Blu-ray, we just want to emphasize that there are no current plans to consider Blu-ray as an option. Microsoft continues to be dedicated to the HD DVD format and we don’t want the Reuters article to mislead or suggest otherwise.”
Blu-ray did well at the High-Def 2.0 conference. The conference was a one day event sponsored by Home Media Magazine in cooperation with The Hollywood Reporter and the Entertainment Merchants Association.
Awards were given out for the best High Definition discs, the Blu-ray title Casino Royale got the Live Action Title of the Year, while ‘300′ was awarded the best overall HD Disc. In all Blu-ray picked up 7 or the 11 awards on offer.
Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator is proposing an upgrade of the broadcasting technology to allow for more channels and HD TV broadcasts. The changes involved would be changing the coding standard for digital terrestrial television (DTT) from MPEG2 to MPEG4. This change will effectively make it twice as efficient.
Ed Richards, head of Ofcom, said: “Our proposals to upgrade Digital Terrestrial Television represent a major opportunity to build on its success with wider, richer and more varied television services, including the potential for HDTV to be made available to millions of people free to air. We look forward to hearing the views of viewers and from right across the industry.”
Toshiba released firmware upgrades for its 3rd Generation HD DVD players. The firmware version is now 1.3 and this upgrade applies to the following models: HD-A30, HD-A3, HD-D3, and HD-A35
Toshiba gave these details on their website:
“As part of our commitment to provide world-class service to our customers, Toshiba is supplying this firmware update for use by purchasers of Toshiba HD DVD Player models HD-A30, HD-A3, HD-D3, and HD-A35. This firmware update improves network connectivity for supporting the download of web-enabled network content associated with certain HD DVD discs, improves certain video and audio processing capabilities, and also addresses certain disc playback and HDMI/DVI related issues identified by Toshiba.”
The price has been dropped for Samsung’s BD-P1400 Blu-ray Player on Amazon. The price is a record low for a Blu-ray player and is currently being sold in the US for $339.00. This bodes well for the Blu-ray camp as many people feel the players are too expensive.
Acer claims to be offering the first laptop to feature a DVD drive that can play both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. The laptop is the Acer Aspire M5630 and comes equipped with a GGC-H20N from Hitachi-LG, it has the ability to play 1920 x 1080 resolution HD DVD content. The laptop also comes equipped with an Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor with 500GB HDD.
The new feature packed Panasonic DMP-BD30K has had its November 12th release date delayed. The new release date set has been confirmed as 1 December 2007, so we will not have too long to wait.
The DMP-BD30 features Final Standard Profile which adds a number of new and enhanced features. Amongst other things Final Standard Profile gives the ability to play Picture-in-Picture (PIP) and allows for Audio Mixing. The BD30 also comes with an SD slot which can play a slide show complete with music, very similar to iPhoto. The SD Memory Card slot also allows for playback of High Definition content recorded in the AVCHD format, and viewing of digital still images from cameras.
This new player is far more advanced than any other player currently on the market, the first to offer many of its features.
