Sony is apparently going to actually start shipping single-layered Blu-ray discs later this month, which means they’ll hit retail around April. At least in Europe.
At least in Germany, the initial price is going to be about $30 apiece for the write-once version and $36 for the rewritable version of the 25gb optical disc. That’s $1.20/gigabyte of storage, or about 12 times higher than the per-gigabyte cost for DVD-R and DVD+R blanks these days. They’ll have to hit the $2-$2.50/apiece pricepoint to be worthwhile except for those people concerned more about physical storage space for optical media.
Currently I’ve got probably 3,000-4,000 DVD-R/DVD+Rs and would love to be able to cut that number by 75 percent. Or wait for the dual-layered discs supposedly arriving in late 2006.