As Sony Corp. and Pioneer, leaders in consumer electronics production, recently announced that they will delay the release dates for their Blu-ray disc players to August and September, and, in the same time, others important Blu-ray manufacturers such as Toshiba and Thomson will comfortably split the high-definition market share ruled by their HD DVD players, informs X-bit Labs.

As you know, there is a war going on between the Blu-ray media and the HD DVD. The manufacturers created two armies, but the battle field and 'the victims' remain the same as usual - the consumers and the dedicated market.
But it seems that this war has reached it's climax, as Sony just announced it will soon release its movies on Blu-ray media and has also launched a dedicated high quality notebook, a signature on the 'Blu-ray declaration'.

Let's see what happened in the past weeks… First of all, Sony and Pioneer, will launch their players later than planned, and only Samsung Electronics is anticipated to release its Blu-ray disc player in late June. Nevertheless, we can expect radical change of plans, as the company did that many times before.

Now let's think of the reason behind Sony's action. You all know, or imagine, how expensive Blu-ray equipments are, especially the ones needed for mass production. However, this is not the main reason, as the company intends to release soon its great PlayStation 3, the so rumored gaming console, which features, as you know, Blu-ray capabilities.

As a result, we can say that if Sony is concentrating on its console PS3 will get all the attention. And it better be taking care of its console because if other 'moles' will come out into the light revealing nasty info, Sony and its PS3 might be at high risk.

At the end of last month, Sony DADC announced that it is finally launching its Blu-ray Disc BD-ROM (video, games, and data) production in the U.S., according to Hardware Zone.

Sony DADC in the U.S. currently has three Blu-ray replication lines functioning with a capacity of 25,000 single-layer 25GB Blu-ray Discs per day, for a total of 750,000 Blu-ray Discs per month. This capacity is expected to increase to nearly 5 million discs per month by October as additional lines are added to the facility. Six of these additional lines will be capable of manufacturing 50GB dual layer Blu-ray Discs.

The company also stated that it will ship 25-GB BD media, which will retail for about $25 each disc. The 50-GB versions of the media (BD-R and BD-RE) will be dual-layer discs to be sold for $48 and $60, similar to pricing on TDK's or Panasonic's BD media.