Samsung and The Dual HD-DVD/Blu-ray Player

In the computer industry, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray wars have brought some good and some bad things to the consumers. I'll start off with the bad things, the bad thing is that these products cost enormous amount of money, and people are buying them, when in the same price range you could have more desirable alternatives. The good thing is more of a relative matter, it depends on where you look at it from, it's a good thing for manufacturers because they have now spawn the idea of making a trade-off and include support for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray into one player, advantage manufacturers; and a bad thing for the people that want to have players for both formats, and have already purchased one of the two.

Support for both HD-DVD and Blurry has been one of the matters to which Samsung paid attention to and designed a new Duo HD player called BD-UP5000. The model is compatible with the second generation of Blurry standards and supports both formats' interactive technologies, HDi and BD-Java.

Dongsoo Jun, Executive Vice President of the Digital AV Division at Samsung Electronics said: "We are very pleased to announce the upcoming release of our Duo HD player. Consumers are hungry for more HD content but are currently confused about competing formats. Samsung's Duo HD player will allow consumers access to every HD movie title available regardless of the authoring format. Samsung is committed to making life simpler through technology and will market next generation DVD products which will satisfy the consumer and market requirement. This is a big win for the consumer. As a member of the DVD Forum and contributor to the DVD Industry, we recognize that both HD-DVD and BD formats have merits. As such, we have decided to market a dual format player. Samsung is flexible to market a stand-alone HD-DVD player whenever consumers demand it. Our main concern is not technology but consumer choice."

As for what the numbers have to say about who's winning this battle in the entertainment area, according to Nielsen VideoScan's, a market monitor, Blurry is leading sales of pre-recorded content in the US, mostly due to the PlayStation 3, with 708.600 HD-DVDs being sold from the beginning of the war, and 844.000 Blurry disks.

Ron Sanders, President of Warner Home Video said in a statement: "We welcome Samsung's Duo HD player as another solution in the marketplace that will help reduce consumer confusion and buyer hesitancy towards HD media. This is an innovative product that can move us closer to mainstream consumer adoption of HD technologies."