Pioneer unveils its first commercial Blu-ray HD player and targets May launch

[The News Bot]

Following are the pertinent bits from a press release from Pioneer about its new Blu-ray DVD player – due for launch in the US as early as May… "Pioneer Electronics (USA) has introduced one of the world’s first Blu-ray Disc players, marking an innovation in home entertainment that allows consumers...

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[sbowler]

It wont win many converts at such a scary price, now HDDVD at $499 thats got may attension....

[bertha]

This makes the prospect of the PS3 all the more interesting..

[FiftyPence]

ROFL, should go nicely with my recently ordered Pioneer PDP-506XDE Plasma

[The Atheist]

prices should plummet once (and if it is included!) the PS3 is released.

I get the feeling most people will be sticking with normal DVDs for a while yet.

Does anyone know how much Blu-Ray/HD-DVDs will retail at?

[lar77]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

prices should plummet once (and if it is included!) the PS3 is released.

I get the feeling most people will be sticking with normal DVDs for a while yet.

Does anyone know how much Blu-Ray/HD-DVDs will retail at?

Thats a good question! How much are BR movie disks going to cost. I heard that the PS3 games are going to be really expensive because of BR.

[ripclaw]

There are some limitations to this player, as discussed on AVSForum.com (the US equivalent of this site). Some of them are:

1) No internal DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD decoders. As a result, you won't be able to use the 5.1 analogue RCA jacks for DTS-HD. This datastream is only available via HDMI.
2) No HD video via the component outputs. Only available via HDMI.
3) Regular DTS bitstream can be output over coax.

$1800 for this?! No thanks. I'll wait for a Blu-Ray player that can do the internal decoding of the audio before buying. Sony's players sound more interesting than this Pioneer.

[Steve.EX]

It would appear that the prerequisite for all DVD HD players is to reduce resolution on analogue (component) outputs this is or will be commonly known as Image Restraint. As i understand it the hardware will reduce (or downscale) the line count on a software dependant flag, refered to as Image Restraint Token. There is currently an ongoing humdrum between the movie distribution companies as to who will support this flag and who will not. Predictably the camps are split.