In order to better compete with Toshiba, Sony slashed the price of its latest Blu-Ray player. Back in February, Sony announced that the BDP-S300 would sell for $599, but today the Japanese company said it had slashed the price by $100, due to to lower-than-expected manufacturing costs.

The first BluRay player launched by Sony last year in November, BDP-S1, was priced at $1000.

Although, a Sony official said the price drop was unrelated to Toshiba’s HD-DVD players, which are much cheaper (a HD-DVD player costs about $400).

The battle between rages on for about two years and some producers thing it can only be solved through a dual player.

At this year CES LG was the first company to announce a dual player, "Super Multi Blue" Player, compatible with Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD read/write and HD-DVD-ROM.

The unit supports various A/V formats, including MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264 video, MPEG1/2 audio, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital+, DTS and DTS-HD audio, and includes multiple inputs/outputs such as HDMI out, component/composite video outputs, and optical/coaxial/discrete 5.1 channel audio outputs, among others.

In April, Samsung announced Duo HD player (BD-UP5000) which will fully support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats and their interactive technologies, HDi and BD-Java.

With the Duo HD consumers can enjoy additional studio content such as trailers, director's comments, more elaborate interactive menus and behind the scene footage.