You won’t find one in stores until March. What’s interesting is that everyone these days wants to be ‘first’. But what is that old adage again? Never buy the first version of anything – who wants to be the bug tester? It’s always better to buy the second, or preferably the third version of any product.

Of course you could wait forever, but it’s not hard to see competitors already at work on their own dual-format players, while LG’s labs are no doubt already cooking up the BH200 which will likely fix most of the deficiencies in the BH100 and make it faster, as always happens with technology.

Just like LG’s Internet Fridge, this player was never really meant to be purchased by anyone. It’s a brilliant marketing move that ensures LG stays in people’s minds as the company that made brought the dual-format player to market. But we have to remember this is a version 1.0 device.

The Blu-ray and HD DVD market is still very young, and most of the devices on the market are first generation products, or slight evolutions thereof. Japan has the most advanced Blu-ray and HD DVD players on sale, given the technologies are from Sony and Toshiba, and as far as I’m aware these aren’t yet on sale in the US.

This market will rapidly evolve. Faster players, units that record, built-in terabyte hard drives  and built-in wireless 802.11n, in addition to all the outputs and inputs you could desire, are coming. Given the pace of change, we could have one on the market by Christmas 2007!

LG also took time to demo GGW-H10N Super Multi Blue Drive at the same price. It works in desktop, server and media center PCs, and writes to Blu-ray discs, DVDs and CDs, while also being able to read HD DVDs. Thankfully, it’s able to write at speeds of 4x – significantly faster than Toshiba’s new HD DVD burner which only works at 1x. LG’s 4x burning means it takes around 23.5 minutes to burn a 25Gb disc. It burns 50Gb discs too, at what we can only assume takes around 50 minutes – or nearly an hour. 

Given that DVD burners recently reached 22x speeds, speedier next generation multi-burners that work with Blu-ray, HD DVD, DVD and CD can only be months away – even if the burn time is only cut in half.

Cheers to LG for forcing the Blu-ray and HD DVD issue so forcefully by releasing these products. For that, we can all thank you, and we look forward to the real response of your competitors, which will only come in the form of future products.

We can safely guess that few consumers will buy these version 1.0 devices. Already we know that Christmas season sales were well below expectations. Consumer electronics manufacturers need to bring on Blu-ray and HD DVD combo recorders with a hard drive and more as quickly as possible at realistic prices.

Otherwise, these types of recorders could easily face obliteration by Windows Vista Media Centers for recording high-def video onto a hard drive which can be burnt onto a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc if desired, with a presumed Mac OS X 10.5 ‘Media Center’ and iTV combo being able to do exactly the same thing.
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