Samsung Dual-Format High-Def Player Does Blu-ray and HD DVD
Samsung isn't billing its BD-UP5000 Duo HD Player as Tolkien's One Ring equivalence for high-definition players, but the BD-UP5000 comes pretty close to that aspiration nonetheless. This highly anticipated universal high-definition player plays back both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD.
The player is the first announced to handle the full spectrum of both the Blu-ray and the HD DVD specifications. LG made a splash earlier this year with its BH100 dual-format player; but, that player was hampered by its inability to play back HD DVD's interactive HDi menus. By contrast, the BD-UP5000 Duo can handle both formats' interactive technologies: BD-Java and HDi.
You'll pay dearly for the chance to have both formats in one, though: This player carries a list price of $1049. I wouldn't be surprised to see the street price fall from that mark once the machine ships, though--high-def players overall seem to be hitting store shelves at lower and lower prices.
UPDATE: And, sadly, you won't get support for the forthcoming update to Blu-ray's minimum player specs that go into effect October 31. Those specs delineate requirements for in-unit storage (256MB for those keeping score), picture-in-picture via a secondary audio and video decode, and ethernet-enabled interactivity. Samsung's own initial press release, distributed earlier today, noted the player will have local storage and picture-in-picture--however, it did not specify that those features would be strictly for HD DVD discs (the company has since updated their info). Later in the day I met with Samsung's Maria Colon, marketing manager, and Reid Sullivan, vice president of marketing; they clarified that the BD-UP5000's storage and picture-in-picture would only work or HD DVD discs, not Blu-ray Discs. Sullivan also said that Samsung would not have a Blu-ray player with the updated specs until 2008.
Samsung is checking to see whether support for the new Blu-ray specs might be viable through a future firmware update. My guess is the necessary guts to do so may not be there, but one could hope.
Ultimately, I find it a shame that a consumer electronics giant such as Samsung failed to have the foresight to consider beyond the short-term for this player's hardware. As Sullivan noted in conversation with me, it's the proverbial chicken-and-egg challenge: If the software (meaning: Blu-ray movies) aren't out that require the storage and picture-in-picture, then why should the hardware makers rush to integrate those features?
I disagree with that approach--it's conceivable that a player manufacturer could integrate the necessary hardware to support the new spec, and then update the player via firmware to turn those features on when ready. That approach would be a boon to consumers, who get new features (already, manufacturers have added things like Dolby TrueHD and other audio codec support via firmware).
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
YAY! Thanks for this product.....now we get the best of both worlds!
First time that I have seen this article.
A blu-ray company not having enough faith to include picture-in picture is as interesting as Sony admitting that it will be difficult for Blu-ray to win the Blu-ray versus HD DVD war.
This article probably also verifies that the Blu-ray movie companies donot have faith in Blu-ray technology.
It appears that the author of this article is a Blu-ray supporter that makes things ironical besides that this article is objective.
I prefer HD DVD, because action speaks louder than words - superior than Blu-ray. It appears that more information can be stored onto the DVD disks than the Blu-ray discs. That would explain why Microsoft and Intel with access with the relevant computer programming expertise chose HD DVD rather than Blu-ray. To summarize in computer programming it appears that the 'high hit rate' (efficiency) of HD DVD programming is superior than Blu-ray, despite Blu-ray claiming to have larger storage space..