LG to launch dual Blu-ray and HD DVD player at CES

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 04 January 2007 15:24

Your IT - Entertainment

And there was always the rumor of a dual next-generation deck. LG and Samsung have battled it out in the rumor stakes, but every time an executive at Samsung hinted they might be thinking of this, there was always the next-day denial, as if someone at Sony had called Samsung to say ‘hey, what’s going on?’.

Whether it happened that way or not, LG is the company that will force all other next-gen player manufacturers to reconsider their plans. Philips, who created the DVD+R standard in competition with the DVD-R standard, took at least three generations of DVD+R/RW recorder before they gave in, and offered a DVD/Hard Drive recorder that worked with both plus and minus discs – something their ‘DVD minus’ promoting competition had also given in to as well.

But in an world where progress seems to speed up every year, the change from Blu-ray or HD DVD only units has only lasted for a few months before someone, in this case LG, has decided to change things at last.

While the first unit will be expensive, follow up units from LG and others will get progressively cheaper, while recording units to arrive this year as well. Christmas 2007 will see players and recorders at much more realistic prices, but they’ll have to face threats from Apple’s iTV, the Xbox 360 movie and TV show download service and ever increasing hard drives that will make 50GB of space on a plastic disk seem to small to worry about.

Prices for standalone players will surely have to drop, too - unless LG's dual system is ridiculously expensive. High prices can only last for so long in this case.

Big cheers to LG for being brave enough to be the first to bridge the gap. Now we await the response of their competitors, as the speed all the manufacturers and movie studios work at will determine just how quickly the new formats are taken up by the already indebted public.

One thing’s for sure: their efforts up until now have definitely not had the desired effect. The battle to launch high definition was finally won, but the war has a very long way to go just yet.