I've just noticed that blank Blu-Ray discs are starting to drop in price.

A 5 pack of 2x speed Verbatim BD-R discs are now £32.99, which works out at £6.59 a disc. Still quite expensive, but half the price they were in December! So the price is falling.

Maybe by the summer BD-R will be an affordable large media format. I will definitely be buying a Blu-Ray writer as soon as the discs are affordable. 25-50GB per disc will greatly improve the manageability of large rom sets.
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Unfortunately as the Pound is so crap and the Yen is so strong the price of anything made in Japan is going up. In fact because the Pound is so crap the price of all imported goods will be going up. Canon have increased the price of their goods by 5% in Europe and 10% in the UK. So you may now be able to afford the disks but you won't be able to afford the drive.
I'll wait till the next lot of disk formats to come along and get the one that Sony have had nothing to do with.
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I had the feeling that Blu-Ray will be with us for at least the next 5 years, if not longer. It has the support of the whole electronics industry now.

What do you have against Sony? I've always liked their products.
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Never liked Sony. So much so I refuse to buy any of their products. Chances are that I've got a drive mechanism that originated from them but I will never knowingly buy a Sony product.
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That is great for us here in Luxembourg, as the £ has almost the same value than the € and we can buy stuff in the UK a lot cheaper. Actually 1 UK£ = 1.06 €
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Blu-ray movies and players are starting to drop in price rapidly also, and sales have been rising sharply as a result. It's a shame that all this is coinciding with the economic downturn, otherwise Blu-ray would've skyrocketed to mainstream by now already.

Oh, I bought a Sony 16GB MP3/MP4 player the other day ... great stuff
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All CD's are Sony's product (well, in the same sense as Blu-Ray is Sony's product). It's just a specification written down by them, but it's now maintained by a large consortium of companies. I imagine you could by BR drives and discs that have no Sony hardware in them at all.
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The CD was actually a joint design between Sony and Philips.

Did you also know that the first CD released was Brothers in Arms.
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Wrong. That was the first million selling CD and still the most successful CD album. The first commercial CD's pressed were "The Visitors" By ABBA and a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss.
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