Samsung to ship Blu-Ray next month

SO HERE WE ARE in Covent Garden, London, at Paul Allen's achingly trendy The Hospital, a lifestyle- conference-restaurant-recording studio joint where it's cool to stand around observing the natives as if you were David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. And we're here because the news is that Samsung has just launched the UK's first Blu-Ray player and says it will ship in mid-October.

For Samsung, this represents the "ultimate viewing experience" and "the future of high-definition content". Apart from decoding format, Americans already have essentially the same box although Samsung put a neat spin on this by saying that this lag means the "firmware issues have been ironed out" for the UK launch.

With Sky HD ready, the time is probably right for a Blu-Ray launch and Samsung believes we Brits in particular still like to own physical media rather than downloaded bytes.

"It's not like we have broadband like Korea where you can download a movie in half an hour," said a spokesman.

The Region 2 box is called the BD-P1000, plays at resolutions up to 1080p and is backwards compatible with CD and DVD formats although Samsung reckons some players from other vendors might not be. The bundled discs are SWAT, from the big Blu-Ray content backer Sony, and Legends of Jazz. Nice.

Sony also plans to have a bunch of Blu-Ray movies as of 16 October, at prices it says will be in the DVD cost range.

As ever with the latest gewgaws, the catch except for the very wealthy or very keen is price. Street price will be about £1,000 and higher although this should soften by about £100 come Christmas. Panasonic should provide some competition within a few weeks and more Samsung boxes with extra home-theatre rigs will be available next year.

At these prices, the Korean giant acknowledged that the box will sell in thousands rather than real volumes this year in the UK but you can expect all good retailers, and some pretty bad ones too, to start displaying Blu-Ray goods very soon indeed. µ