Pioneer, one of the key players in the High Definition format war, has admitted that their Blu-ray player will not launch in September. Instead they are now talking about the CES 2007 expo as the D-day for the European invasion. While Toshiba and the HD-DVD camp are having a slight head start in High Definition player sales, they have not been too successful either - products have not been launched in Europe and the U.S. consumers are complaining that the Toshiba has a poor availability.

Toshiba, leader of the camp that makes the rival standard, the HD-DVD, insists it will be ready to roll in Europe when the Berlin show opens. Both camps have had a rocky beginning in Japan and the US.

At a briefing in Germany, Pioneer said it still had no "concrete" plans for a European launch, but believed the January 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Blu-ray makers hope to offer movie-players in bulk, would "lay the ground" for a Europe launch.

Blu-ray is a disc format that uses the light of blue lasers to read tiny pits in the surface of a disc. CD-ROMs, which are only used today for music, were conceived to hold 0.7 gigabytes of data, DVDs for 4.7 gigabytes per layer and Blu-ray discs for 25 gigabytes.

HD-DVD discs, made to the rival specifications of Toshiba and allies, can only cram 15 gigabytes on a single layer, but are easier to manufacture, and what is more important, have reached the market quicker.

Source: Taipei Times