14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that, even though they have been getting cheaper, Blu-ray disks and drives are still far from taking the place of the DVD on the mainstream market.
The past year has seen several milestones being reaching in term of optical storage.
No doubt in terms of pure storage potential, the so-called superdisk revealed back in May wins, as it has a capacity that it 1,000 times larger than that of Blu-ray.
That one invention, however, is hardly in any position of threatening the current layout of the ODD market.
There was also another milestone, the so-called BDXL specification, which defines a new type of Blu-ray that, depending on how many layers it has, features a capacity of 100 GB or 128 GB.
The main contest over market share has been, of course, held between the DVD and the 'regular' Blu-ray disk, and it seems that things have been dragging on.
As Digitimes has it in one of its most recent reports on the subject, Blu-ray disks and drives won't see any sort of major increase in market share this year, at least not compared to 2009.
At the start of the year, the average price of a Blu-ray unit was $100, after which it began to decrease, until it dropped to $70-80.
Still, it seems that this much will not be enough to allow this part of the ODD market to truly skyrocket, at least not by the end of 2010.
Besides the fact that prices may not have dropped enough for the mainstream, there is another so-called reason.
Apparently, the markets in the US and Europe are still suffering after the economic downturn and this led notebook makers to delay their transition to Blu-ray.
What remains to be seen is is 2011 finally makes a standard specification out of BD.