Pioneer Delays First Blu-ray Player
Posted Wed Jun 7, 2006 at 10:57 AM PDT by
Due to "interoperability" issues, electronics giant Pioneer
said Tuesday it will
push
back the launch of its first Blu-ray player to September, reports Home Media
Retailing.
The company's BDP-HD1 was initially slated to launch in June and retail for
$1,800, but Pioneer decided to hold off to spend more time testing players and
working on interoperability.
"We decided to hold off for bit just to make sure everything works well
relative to all the various studios that are planning to ship BD titles,"
said Andy Parsons, SVP of the industrial solutions business group at Pioneer
Electronics. "Launching a new format is fairly big effort, and you have
such a broad spectrum of capabilities with the media itself, including BD-Java,
content protection layers and various authoring tools that are being brought
up to speed."
Pioneer has also announced they will drop the original $1,800 suggested list
price of the BDP-HD1 to $1,500 when it hits stores in September.