Sony Blu-Ray Blunder

[VS Omega]

UPDATE: Many readers are saying that this story was faked. Well, I'm here to tell you it's far from a lie, and I have more pictures to prove it! In fact, since I enlarged the photo, we noticed that the DVD was actually a DVD+R, not a DVD-R!

PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff attended a Sony event and unlocked a secret. Here is his account:

Sony celebrated a decade of VAIO innovation at the way-out-of-the-way Guest House club in NYC last night. It was your typical self-congratulatory fest, replete with speeches, large posters lauding early product development (of the first purple VAIO and the ultra thin 505 laptop) and even a huge, 70-pound VAIO laptop cake (left). I tried some and the faux magnesium chassis tasted like tin foil—blech.

There were, of course, some more recent vintage products on display like the Sony VAIO XL2 Digital Living System but the true stars of last night's event were Blu-ray, a new Blu-ray VAIO (the AR) and a near-pocket-sized "Micro PC," the VAIO UX. The gorgeous, 17-inch laptop not only has a Blu-ray player, but the drive can even burn Blu-ray discs—a true first.

On one table Sony execs proudly displayed two ARs playing early Blu-ray content: The House of Flying Daggers (below). They even had the Blu-ray packaging. So exciting...but WAIT! I went ahead and ejected one of the Blu-ray drives to see my first Blu-ray disc. Instead, I found a crummy, old school DVD+R, complete with the Sharpie-written, House of Flying Daggers. Apparently even Sony can't get its hands on Blu-ray content!

I say it's good they got owned so badly

[Julie]

lol trust u juz u geek jeez what is blu ray anyway?

[VS Omega]

Blu-ray along with HD-DVD are set to be the new storage and maybe one day movie delivery system. It's like DVD, but it uses a blue laser which has a shorter wave length, so therefore instead of being able to get 4.35 GB out of a disk they can go up to I think ~25 GB.. very impressive, the two formats are both developed and backed by pretty big companies, so it's pretty hard to tell who will win (HD-DVD has Microsoft and Blu-Ray has Sony)

What's funny about this article is that Sony is pushing the hardest to get blu-ray out there (it's standard on the PS3), and wanted people to think they had a notebook able to play blu-ray, but it turns out they either couldn't deliver on time or couldn't get their hands on a blu-ray copy of the movie so they used a pirated DVD version instead

It's going to be used for high-definition movies and what not, and I'm editing now, these companies are

Blu-Ray:
- Apple
- Dell
- HP
- Hitachi
- LG
- Mitsubishi
- Panasonic
- Pioneer
- Phillips
- Samsung
- Sharp
- Sony
- TDK
- Thomson


HD-DVD:
- Toshiba
- NEC
- Sanyo
- Microsoft
- Intel

And yes.. I'm a nerd, and I love it

[pandaman]

lol trust u juz u geek jeez what is blu ray anyway?

Sony's next generation DVD type thingamajiggy with supposedly lots of storage and benefits for the anti piracy types if memory serves, it's read and burned using a blue laser which has a much shorter wavelength than the traditional red laser. They've been harping on about how it's gonna rock all our socks for the past two years, now it looks like they don't quite have all the bugs ironed out and don't wanna admit it.

[VLishes]

Blu-Ray, what a crock of shiyt, HVD is going to kaka all over HD DVD and Blu-Ray.

Ppl who do not know what these are:

# An HD-DVD format that uses a 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology, to be compared with the 650nm-wavelength red laser technology in use in traditional DVD format. The rewritable Blu-ray disc can store up to 27GB of data on a single-sided single layer disc (compared to the traditional DVD’s 4.7GB capacity), which is approximately 12 hours of standard video and/or more than 2 hours of High-Definition video. It has a data transfer rate of 36Mbps. ...

# Blu-ray Disc is a next-generation optical disc format meant for high definition video (HD) and high density data storage, and is one of two competing standards for HD optical media. Its competitor is HD-DVD. Blu-ray gets its name from the shorter wavelength (405 nm) blue laser that, in addition to other techniques, allows it to store substantially more data on the same sized disc than DVD, which uses a longer wavelength (650 nm) red laser. ..

HVD = Holographic Versatile Disc
http://www.optware.co.jp/english/what_040823.htm

[pandaman]

Blu-ray along with HD-DVD are set to be the new storage and maybe one day movie delivery system. It's like DVD, but it uses a blue laser which has a shorter wave length, so therefore instead of being able to get 4.35 GB out of a disk they can go up to I think ~25 GB.. very impressive, the two formats are both developed and backed by pretty big companies, so it's pretty hard to tell who will win (HD-DVD has Microsoft and Blu-Ray has Sony)

What's funny about this article is that Sony is pushing the hardest to get blu-ray out there (it's standard on the PS3), and wanted people to think they had a notebook able to play blu-ray, but it turns out they either couldn't deliver on time or couldn't get their hands on a blu-ray copy of the movie so they used a pirated DVD version instead

Lol, beat me to it. It's not the first time a major tech company has been caught using pirated movies either, I remember an article in New Scientist from a few years back, some company was demonstrating the new (back then anyway) DVD+R format and they were doing it by copying movies. Classic hipocorisy.

[TheForgotten]

what ever happened to optical being the next dvd?

[Slide]

Hopefully they will be chaep enough to buy one of each - failing that i can wait for HVD