Cost of UHD Blu Ray - Is MS subsidizing Xbone S, or is Sony just milking it?

[Pemalite]

Guitarguy said:

Pemalite said:

Hope this is the information you need: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18728620

There are plenty of other drives that only need the same.
LG BH16NS50, BH16NS55, 2nd gen BH/WH14NS40.

Basically majority of drives for the last 12+ months have supported BDXL, but you need more than just BDXL Blu-ray support to playback 4k Blu Rays.
You need various DRM schemes like AACS Legacy+Online for both hardware and software, which I would assume the consoles can side step anyway.

Many 2015 (Even a few 2013 drives) Fuji drives also only require a Firmware update to support Version 2 format disks and/or AACS 2 as per the whitepaper:
ftp://ftp.seagate.com/sff/INF-8090.PDF

You seem very knowledgable on technology in general. Is there any reason you can see why Sony cannot update the blu ray drive to UHD via firmware update??

I haven't looked into a complete breakdown of the PS4 Slim/Pro drives themselves yet, so I can't really answer that question.

However... When the Xbox One and Playstation 4 first launched, the Blu-Ray 4k standard hadn't been fully ratified.
The Original Xbox One and Playstation 4 could actually output 4k already, thanks to the inclusion of HDMI 1.4. (Although limited to 30hz.)

The issue with those consoles actually came down to the drives themselves, from there everything gets pretty messy.