New Player in Blu-Ray Disc Market

Well if the idea of play BR titles on a relatively cheap PS3 doesn't get your fancy, perhaps a cheap stand alone player will. Funai Electric, an OEM manufacturer, intends to release Blu-ray players to the market for about $500 a pop later this year. Good news for consumers who are not early adopters and would have paid twice that much for a first gen player. I would imagine it will not have all the goodies like 1080p/24 output and lossless audio codec decoding support.

From the article:

The company, which is known for its low-cost consumer electronics products, plans to have a Blu-ray Disc player available before the end of 2007, said Naoyuki Takanaka, a spokesman for the company.

The product won't be sold under the Funai name but offered to other consumer electronics companies on an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) basis for resale under their respective brand names.

Takanaka wouldn't disclose Funai's target price for the player but a report in Friday morning's Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun industrial daily said it will cost around US$500, or about ¥60,000.