"Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will get a jump on its competitors by launching a Blu-ray Disc player in April this year, it said Thursday at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Most other Blu-ray Disc supporters that have talked about shipping dates have set mid-2006 targets, so the Samsung machine currently stands to be the first to market. Toshiba Corp. is planning to launch two players that support HD-DVD, the competing format to Blu-ray Disc, in March this year.

The BD-P1000 player will cost US$1,000 and will be able to output high-definition video on an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) at 720p and 1080i (720 lines progressive scanning and 1,080 lines interlaced scanning) resolutions. That’s the same as the Toshiba players and means that both first-generation high-definition optical disc players won’t be able to output a signal at 1080p, which is considered the best of several high-definition picture standards.

Samsung didn’t implement 1080p support in the interest of speeding up development." [more]