An executive from Matsushita Electric Industrial (the company that is best known for its Panasonic trademark) said in an interview that he did not expect adoption of Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies to be rapid in the coming years. Only up to one third of optical drives would feature blue-laser even in 3 years time, he said.

“This year, DVD standards will account for 95% of the global sales volume of all kinds of ODDs (including players and recorders), leaving 5% for Blu-ray and HD DVD. But the proportion for BD and HD DVD will rise to 20% - 30% in 2010,” said Masayuki Kozuka, general manager of Matsushita’s storage device business and alliance development office, in an interview with DigiTimes web-site.

Considering that neither Blu-ray, nor HD DVD has yet won the battle for being de-facto replacement for contemporary DVD, which slowdowns sales of new-generation optical formats, it is not a surprise that even consumer electronics companies do not expect rapid adoption of high-definition video formats even in spite of the fact that popularity of HD-capable TV-sets has been gradually rising for quite some time now.

It is interesting to note that Mr. Kozuka believes that adoption of new-generation optical drives on the PC market would not be rapid too.

“The shipment volume of desktop and notebook PCs equipped with BD and/or HD DVD burners/drives will reach an estimated 35 million units in 2010, accounting for 17.5% of the projected 200 million units for all PCs,” Mr. Kozuka said.

Though, his numbers may be put under doubt, as even in 2006, according to IDC market research firm, there were 228 million computers sold (including desktops, notebooks and x86 servers) and with compound annual growth rate of 10%, it can be expected that in 2010 there will be approximately 330 million systems shipped. Still, Panasonic primarily pins most of its HD video hopes onto consumer electronics, not the PC market.

“For DVD standards, the demand began with stand-alone DVD players and then extended to PC-use drives and burners. Today sales volume for the latter is estimated to be five times that for the former. The trend of development for blue-laser disc drives/players is expected to be the same or similar,” Mr. Kozuka added.