Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira (Post 723280)

The way I see it, why would you not want HD footage on mini Blu-Ray discs as apposed to standard mini DVD’s? That’s a full 7.5 gigs of storage for a single layer disc. Hitachi is in a very good position knowing that they will be the first company to advance to newer technology.

There are already around 5 million Blu-Ray units in people’s homes and yes that does include the PS3 and look how quickly PS3 sales got to be once Sony decided to decrease the price by 100 dollars. Sales went up by around 135%. People are already seeing it as a great media box and other than playing video games and watching Blu-Ray movies; you can serf the web, watch photos and view HDV and AVCHD files on a Data DVD. Because of that, your average consumer doesn’t need to know anything about authoring discs in order to play it on a PS3. If you think about it, the PS3 is the perfect compliment for a TV station just as long as the interns don’t use it for games when their working.

Look how convenient the hard drive version is. You can record your footage on the hard drive and make Blu-Ray copies on the camcorder without using a computer. That’s a great way to give out copies to your friends.

Originally Posted by Tom Roper (Post 723472)

The PS3 is a great media player no doubt, although there's not 5 million Blu-Ray units even counting PS3. It's about 1.5 million PS3 and 140,000 standalone blu-ray players.

There's no proof BD-R/RE will play on Blu-Ray players. So far, it's quite well established that BD-R/RE disks don't play on any of the Sony or Panasonic standalone players. That leaves it basically to PS3 which already plays AVCHD or HDV from DVD5/9 or the internal HDD.

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira (Post 723793)

I was really talking about World wide sales and if I were to give an extremely conservative estimate, I would put it at 4 million units.

Sony players have been receiving upgrades to play at least BD-R discs, and I’ve heard Panasonic and Samsung players should play them fine. As for BD-RE discs, I don’t know what the issue is with all players. Most people will distribute BD-R disc anyway.

Anybody wants to come in here and confirm the compatibilities with BD-R and BD-RE with each Blu-Ray player including the latest firmware upgrades?

Originally Posted by Tom Roper (Post 724036)

ASpeculation is that future firmware updates may retroactively disable BD-R/RE playback, even on the PS3.

It is still speculation, but it comes from a good source.

Needless to say, it's confusing and disappointing, and puts Blu-Ray authoring on BD-R/RE into a state of uncertainty.

http://forums.support.roxio.com/inde...howtopic=25294
http://forums.support.roxio.com/inde...howtopic=23713

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira (Post 723280)

The way I see it, why would you not want HD footage on mini Blu-Ray discs as apposed to standard mini DVD’s? That’s a full 7.5 gigs of storage for a single layer disc. Hitachi is in a very good position knowing that they will be the first company to advance to newer technology.

There are already around 5 million Blu-Ray units in people’s homes and yes that does include the PS3 and look how quickly PS3 sales got to be once Sony decided to decrease the price by 100 dollars. Sales went up by around 135%. People are already seeing it as a great media box and other than playing video games and watching Blu-Ray movies; you can serf the web, watch photos and view HDV and AVCHD files on a Data DVD. Because of that, your average consumer doesn’t need to know anything about authoring discs in order to play it on a PS3. If you think about it, the PS3 is the perfect compliment for a TV station just as long as the interns don’t use it for games when their working, On break that’s a different story. Anyway, If you don’t have a Blu-Ray player, it wont matter that much because you can hook up the camcorder to an HD TV thru HDMI or component.

Look how convenient the hard drive version is. You can record your footage on the hard drive and make Blu-Ray copies on the camcorder without using a computer. That’s a great way to give out copies to your friends.

Back in 2000, Hitachi was the first to release a consumer mini DVD camcorder and they sold so fast that Panasonic had to immediately make their own, and once Sony saw how popular they were, they decided to release their own version as well and now, even Canon has mini DVD based camcorders. The same thing will happen to this camcorder where the other companies will have to release their own version.