Sony are delaying the release of their next-gen console, the imaginatively nomenclatured Playstation 3. Apparently, the current estimated build cost for a single unit is £515. As The XBox 360 is retailing for between £200 to £300 which means that if they did release it this year, they’d be making a substantial loss on each unit sold.

The reason for the huge unit price is probably because they are planning on shipping the PS3 with a Blu-ray Disc drive - the next generation digital media format. Blu-ray is intended to support recording and playback of high-definition video and will also allow storage of up to 25Gb or 50Gb (single or dual layer) of data on a single disc, as compared to a standard DVD which can hold about 5Gb give or take. I won’t go into the technical reasons here… oh, okay, I will. It can do this because rather than using a red laser beam to read and write to the discs like current DVDs and CDs it uses a blue laser beam (hence being called Blu-Ray) which has a narrower wavelength and therefore a more precise laser focus.

The cost of developing a Blu-ray unit is quite high. But Sony - being one of the partner manufacturers of the Blu-Ray Disc Association - is committed to releasing the PS3 with Blu-ray technology. So it looks like they’re going to have to delay the release until they can get the price down. Expect to see it arrive at about the same time as the XBox 720!