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Panasonic Takes Aim With Blu-ray

Techstination feature for Thursday, June 29, 2006

Panasonic takes aim with Blu-ray. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. The battle is underway in earnest between the two rival formats that offer high definition DVD playback. While Toshiba, Microsoft and RCA are among the companies backing a standard called HD DVD, consumer electronics heavyweights Sony, Samsung and Panasonic are in the Blu-ray camp. Panasonic has announced it will begin selling its first Blu-ray player in September for about 13 hundred dollars. And VP Reid Sullivan says the strategy is to market the player with the company's line of home theatre audio systems and plasma screens…

"We certainly will offer it as individual components, but we believe that the best benefit is when it's put all together and the reason for that is all the products are perfectly tuned together. Not only that, but we also have some of our unique technology such as Easy Sync, that allows the products to talk to one another so the consumer only has to push one button, for example, to watch a DVD or Blu-ray movie in this system."

Thirteen hundred dollars is a big investment for a player…especially with a format war going on that could make one or the other obsolete. Sullivan says he's confident Blu-ray will come out on top….

"And the early indication we're getting is that based on the overwhelming support that Blu-ray has, and the overwhelming capacity advantage, as well as the audio and video capabilities, that we're very confident that Blu-ray will ultimately be the most successful format out there."

For those who don't want to choose, it's only a matter of time before players that can work with both formats arrive on the market. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.