Sony reveals a bevy of Blu-ray products

At the end of last week Sony officially announced that the wheels of Blu-ray were truly in motion. Although Sony’s Blu-ray Disc (BD) player won’t be the first of its kind to the market (that honour still looks set for Samsung’s BD-P1000), pre-orders have started in the US for Sony’s BDP-S1 and it should be hitting shelves stateside in July.

Sony is also planning to release BD format movies in time for Samsung’s BD player launch; there will be eight to set things off followed by eight more the next month. Although it is a bit of a pain having to kick our heels until someone decides grace Europe with Blu-ray’s presence, we’re hoping that Sony (or Samsung) will at least have to get its act together if its wants to be able to sell any BD players other than the PS3. If we’re lucky we might even get a better opening film line-up than those being pedalled at the US launch.

But that’s not the only Blu-ray product on the cards. Sony has also revealed its latest BD compatible home computers. The Vaio RC Series will be the company’s first notebook and desktop PCs armed with BD drives capable of writing/re-writing to the new disc formats. They will also come with suite of BD mangement software.

Worryingly, the focus of the press release leans heavily towards the management of your own recorded HD footage rather than using the machines as BD empowered Media Center’s, so reading between the lines I’ll guess that there won’t be an HDCP compliant graphics card in them. Sony HD camcorder owners will probably benefit the most from there computers.

It is some small consolation at least that Sony has decided to relax the HDCP limitations in its initial movie releases but there is no telling how long that generosity will last (presumably just until HD DVD is begging at Blu-ray’s knees is the idea).

Finally Sony has also unveiled its ordinary BD drive, the BWU-100A, due out later in the year (no prices yet) and blank Blu-ray disc media. The 25GB BD-R’s (write only) will sell for $20, 25GB BD-RE (rewriteable) for $25 and each are due out next month. The 50GB versions will cost $48 and $60 respectively and emerge soon afterwards.

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