14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like the war of DVD formats is far from over. Even though, earlier this week, Toshiba's HD-DVD seemed to have a slight advantage over Blu-Ray, things are constantly changing, and fast, for that matter.
Toshiba's main point against the rivals from Sony was the relatively low manufacturing cost for HD-DVD discs, which can be produced using the currently installed technological lines.
Today, however, Pioneer and Mitsubishi have made an announcement that shatters this Toshiba's advantage. Thus, the two manufacturers have managed to reduce the manufacturing costs for the BD-R (Blue-Ray Recordable) discs to 11% of the initial value, by using the spin coating technology, already employed on a large scale in the production of DVD-R.
Taking into consideration Pioneer's statements, according to which the changes to the current technological lines, in order to manufacture Blu-Rays, can be done with minimum expenses, and also seeing that the prototype released today will have a capacity of 25 GB, it looks like Sony's got the advantage now.
This could be the first nail in the HD-DVD coffin, considering that its only great advantage has just been blown up, and as we pointed out in our previous articles, the Blu-Ray discs were already backed by most of the PC manufacturers. And seeing that the Blu-Ray technology will also be implemented in the Sony Playstation 3, the future of Toshiba's format seems very gloomy right now.