In an effort to push the HD-DVD market forward and leading an advantage over Blu-ray, a report saying that Toshiba is selling its first generation HD-DVD players at a "substantial" loss. According to an analysis of Toshiba's bill-of-materials (BOM), its HD-A1 HD-DVD player amounts up to an estimated $674. In fact, costs are likely to be higher because that figure doesn't include costs of packaging, testing, remote control costs, cables and other costs.
One of the aspects of the HD-A1 player is that it uses a general purpose processor -- Intel's Pentium 4. Instead of using embedded application specific processors, Toshiba's player opted to use Intel's processor out of time constraint.
The HD-A1 actually comes packed with a list of interesting technologies. For example, it uses a 1GB DIMM from Hynix for system memory, a 256MB flash memory disk from M-Systems and 32MB of MirrorBit flash memory from a company called Spansion. We're uncertain why the player comes packed with three different types of memory but according to iSuppli, all that memory adds up to about $247.
Analysts predict that Toshiba may be able to recoup its losses with subsequent HD-DVD players, but they question whether or not Toshiba's risk was worth taking. Blu-ray itself has been having significant problems making it into the hand's of consumers. Earlier this week DailyTech reported that Sony announced yet another delay in the Blu-ray journey.
sa: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3006