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Playstation 3 Blu Ray drive will cost Sony $100+

Games Developers Conference Europe In first half of 2006

By Fuad Abazovic in Londinium: Friday 02 September 2005, 13:06

BLU RAY drives for the Playstation 3 will cost Sony a small fortune. It turns out that at the release of the console in the first half of 2006, Sony will have to pay more than $100 per drive it builds in Playstation 3. This is a lot of money, because even in retail you can buy a DVD +RW drive for less than $50 now. This means that Microsoft can get it much cheaper than $50, maybe even half that price, due to the enormous quantity it needs to buy for millions of XboX 360 consoles.

Blu Ray marchitecture looks great as its backward compatible with DVDs and CDs, and you can store 25GB per layer on the Blu Ray media. This will provide you with an amazing 50GB for two layer drives at some point in the future.

Nevertheless, it's a very expensive step that Sony is willing to take as it will increase cost of Playstation 3 unit dramatically. Sony said Playstation 3 is going the be expensive and this is one of the reasons why.

Microsoft is playing a safe game here, it will launch with DVD+RW but in some point in the future might release a new Xbox 360 version with HD-DVD or a Blu Ray drive. We don’t expect that this will happen anytime soon, but we are sure it will happen at some point in the next few years.

At least Sony will push the mass availability of Blu Ray drives and medias as it plans to ship hundredes of thousands of consoles in 2006.