Why so big?

So, as I’m reading through this months ‘T3′ magazine I see the review for the first Blu-ray player to hit the UK; Samsung’s BD-P1000 that rather ironically costs £1000. To my amusement there is a full page advert on the previous page to advertise it, only to be then shot down on the next page by T3 giving it just 3 stars out of a maximum of 5. This is because it has the ability to output at 1080p which makes it rather expensive and sadly doesn’t impress enough to justify the price all that well.

It then occurred to me while looking at the advert that shows the full scale of the thing that these standalone HD-DVD and Blu-ray players are impressively gargantuan, I mean, really huge. Look at the PlayStation 3; we all know it has Blu-ray playing capabilities of its own but look at its size compared to the Samsung BD-P1000. It’s got to be at least 25% shallower and about a third less in width and still manages incorporates the console itself as well as a PlayStation 2 CPU and GPU to boot. So why so big? It’s not just Samsung either and not just Blu-ray and PlayStation 3. Microsoft’s HD-DVD add on to the Xbox 360 is extremely small and when put next to the console, both together are around 4 times as small as Toshiba’s RD-A1 HD-DVD player. So why does Hi-def have to be ‘hello-big’? Just a little thought I had…