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Have you ever purchased something at a store and then asked yourself, “I just paid $40 for this but it probably only cost 40 cents in materials to make?” It’s sort of a natural instinct, especially for anyone who’s worked in retail, to size up the value in their heads.

According to optical disc industry officials, the cost of DVD duplication for a Blu Ray disc is quite high. A single layer HD DVD, with the capacity or 15GB, costs $1.15 to manufacture. A 25 GB Blu Ray disc costs $1.30, whereas your standard Dual Layer DVD would cost $0.50. This of course is all assuming that you’re buying 25,000 discs at a shot. Across town, at another Blu Ray DVD authoring plant, single-layer Blu Ray discs are going for $1.35 - $1.45, while the 50 GB dual-layer Blu Rays are going for $2.15 - $2.25! If you’re doing the math, that’s roughly 45 cents per GB. Also, don’t forget there’s a setup cost that could be as much as $5,000 per line.

According to optical disc industry officials, the cost of DVD duplication for a Blu Ray disc is quite high. A single layer HD DVD, with the capacity or 15GB, costs $1.15 to manufacture. A 25 GB Blu Ray disc costs $1.30, whereas your standard Dual Layer DVD would cost $0.50. This of course is all assuming that you’re buying 25,000 discs at a shot. Across town, at another Blu Ray DVD authoring plant, single-layer Blu Ray discs are going for $1.35 - $1.45, while the 50 GB dual-layer Blu Rays are going for $2.15 - $2.25! If you’re doing the math, that’s roughly 45 cents per GB. Also, don’t forget there’s a setup cost that could be as much as $5,000 per line.

Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical Media have opted to create a new disc using an “organic dye recording layer, which is sometimes referred to as “LTH format,” that will reduce material costs and also allow existing CD-R and DVD-R manufacturers to upgrade their facilities to BD-R, using modified equipment, rather than a whole new line.

For a regular computer, Pioneer has a line of relatively inexpensive bare bones (single layer) Blu Ray burners for $155 - $179. Of course, the drives for laptops are slightly more expensive and must be bought internally at the time of purchase. The ranges go up to $660 for LaCie and $360 for the more futuristic-looking Lite-On. Most burners will also burn CDs and regular DVDs. Then, of course, there are the brand new double layer burners retailing currently at $500 that allow copy protection and the ability to burn to 50 GB. This is only the beginning of consumer costs, though, because you haven’t even gotten into BD-R disc costs yet.

As you know, DVD duplication is no easy task. It’s not like burning a CD, where you can just easily rip it onto your computer in five or ten minutes. Instead, you’ll need special software to break through copyright barriers and you’ll have to wait much longer for the information to copy. Software company “SlySoft”

claims to have AnyDVD HD software that can break Blu Ray’s BD protection to make copies of commercially released Blu Ray titles. The large film studios were originally enticed by Sony’s BD copy protection, which they felt was far superior to Toshiba/Microsoft’s HD DVD. SlySoft promises that they’ll be continually trying to keep up with the latest innovations that Sony can come up with and that they’re currently offering the ability to bypass the beginning warnings, age restrictions and limitations on some BR discs.