Toshiba US has had to revise its estimates of the number of HD DVD devices that it will ship in 2007, slashing 800,000 devices off its previous 1.8 million estimate, it told Reuters this week.
Against an estimate of 3 million sales worldwide by March 2008 it now looks like being reduced to under 2 million. By comparison Sony’s Blu-ray devices in the PS3 alone will reach around 6 million devices by much the same date, with a substantial number of additional stand alone devices sold and their prices falling by the day. Sony, Panasonic and Samsung are all selling Blu-ray players.
Toshiba’s arguments that consumers who are buying the Playstation 3 are buying it as a game console and not to watch high-definition movies flies in the face of disk shipments, which are now dramatically higher for Blu-ray than they are for HD DVD.
But Toshiba is not giving up the ghost and this week announced new DVR models in its native Japan which include HD DVD recordable drives.