Panasonic beams Blu-ray to your home

Panasonic wants to remodel your entertainment centre around Blu-ray.

In September, the company will begin to sell a Blu-ray player, as well as an audio-video receiver and a set of speakers tuned to work with the player. Panasonic will promote these components alongside its plasma TVs: the company will deliver a 65-inch plasma TV to coincide with the Blu-ray launch.

The equipment comes in the midst of the high-definition optical disc wars. Toshiba earlier this year released an HD DVD player as well as a laptop with an HD DVD drive. Samsung, Sony and other Blu-ray supporters are releasing their first products now.

Panasonic has already released recordable Blu-ray drives for PCs and has come up with tools to make video authoring easier. Hi-def camcorders now cost around £1,000, but relatively inexpensive -- £500 or less -- HD video cameras will emerge over the next 18 to 24 months, according to manufacturers.

Right now, HD DVD players are considerably less expensive than Blu-ray players. Blu-ray backers, however, say their discs will hold more data. A single-layer disc will hold 25GB, and a multi-layer disc will be capable of storing 200GB on eight layers, which is more than enough for a high-definition movie and a tonne of extras.

Like all things Blu-ray, Panasonic's living room components won't be cheap. The player, which plays discs but can't record, will retail for $1,299.95 (£715), while the receiver will sell for $999.95. The speakers will go for $2,999.95. Consumers will be able to buy the components separately, or as part of a package. (UK prices weren't available.)

The cost of Blu-ray players will come down over time, according to Kazuhiro Tsuga, executive officer in charge of digital network and software technologies for Matsushita, which sells products under the Panasonic name in North America and Europe. The biggest problem when it comes to cost right now is the laser and the lenses. As volume manufacturing kicks in, prices will fall, Tsuga said.

The price of Blu-ray media will also drop, he added. Panasonic has developed a spin-coat method for discs that will drop the price. Right now recordable Blu-ray discs cost about £10.

Price, he added, is one of the reasons consumers won't see a combination Blu-ray HD DVD player from Panasonic.

"It would be considerably more expensive," he said. A single drive that could play both types of discs would also be thicker, and as a result, unwieldy in laptops.

"In Japan, Blu-ray is dominant," he said. Sony and a few others actually released Blu-ray equipment in that country a few years ago, he said. (The companies behind Blu-ray also stand to earn royalties for the invention, other executives at Blu-ray companies have said.)

Blu-ray, he asserted, also has stronger support from the film studios and equipment makers. Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Dell, Apple, Philips and several Japanese companies stand behind Blu-ray. The HD DVD side, though, isn't exactly weak: it includes Intel, Microsoft, Toshiba and Universal.

Hewlett-Packard, Paramount and Warner Brothers have opted to support both.