Philips Blu-ray Disc Player Offers High-Definition Home Entertainment Experience

January 8, 2007 – Philips, a pioneer in high-definition (HD) technology, delivers the ultimate HD experience to consumers with its Blu-ray Disc player (BDP9000). Shown today at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Blu-ray Disc player pairs stylish design with unbeatable sound and picture quality.

Philips’ Blu-ray Disc player is loaded with features that provide the most stunning pictures available, including 1080p resolution and a component video output that provides brilliant imagery. Rich surround sound is heightened with multichannel audio decoding and digital audio optical outputs. Fully backward compatible, the player not only plays consumers’ existing DVDs, but it also enhances the picture quality, upscaling it to 1080p.

“Blu-ray represents a surge forward in the home entertainment viewing experience,” said Andy Mintz, senior vice president of marketing, Philips Consumer Electronics, North America. “With the overwhelming support of studios and manufacturers, consumers can be sure that the HD future lies with Blu-ray.”

HDTVs are expected to have outsold analog sets by around 90 percent in 2006, according to research from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). As consumers migrate to these HDTV sets, they see that a standard DVD doesn’t offer the HD content they expect. Philips’ Blu-ray Disc player delivers on the HD promise with pristine 1080p picture quality and booming surround sound.

As a leader in the consumer electronics industry, Philips is one of the companies responsible for the development of the Blu-ray Disc Format. As a Board member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, Philips is highly involved in the development of the Blu-ray Disc standard, just as the company led the revolution of the CD and DVD formats.

Blu-ray Disc has the support of more than 170 companies including virtually all major CE manufacturers and PC manufacturers as well as seven of the eight major Hollywood studios, which are responsible for nearly all current DVD sales, as well as the leading games developers and music labels.

Blu-ray solutions are the answer to an evolution in HD entertainment and digital archiving, providing massive amounts of storage. For instance, Philips’ single-layer 25GB1 Blu-ray Disc provides immense storage by holding multiple hours of HD video, 12 hours of standard definition DVD quality content or 360 hours of MP3 music. 

This Blu-ray Disc capacity enables the playback of full-length feature movies using MPEG2 encoding – the native compression technique for HDTV broadcasts – or even more capacity with advanced codes such as AVC and Windows Media® Video HD (VC-1). It is the only recording format providing 25 GB of storage on a single-layer disc and 50 GB on a dual-layer disc.

The BDP9000 Blu-ray Disc player, available now, has a suggested retail price of $999. Philips is now shipping 25 GB, single-layer recordable (BD-R) and single-layer recordable and erasable (BD-RE) Blu-ray Discs.

SOURCE Royal Philips Electronics