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The company says it has received orders for 21 Blu-ray dual-layer machines in the first quarter, which is more than it saw for DVD production systems 11 years ago.

In addition, Singulus claims that it is expecting the retail prices for the Blu-ray hardware to drop substantially compared to the prices at the beginning of 2008.

"This

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means that the orders for Blu-ray in the first year of the dual layer technology already by far exceeded the volume at the start of the DVD eleven years ago with 17 machines," said chief financial officer Stefan Baustert.

The emergence of Blu-ray as the format of choice for movie studios was propelled recently, when Warner Bros. announced that it would be exclusively supporting the Blu-ray format, rather than HD-DVD, for its forthcoming releases. Singulus also revealed that it has received additional orders for Blu-ray dual-layer machines this quarter, and disclosed that a key US customer has purchased one of the machines for the first time.

Hollywood studios have already announced many new titles on Blu-ray discs and the rise of Blu-ray has received yet another boost with the introduction of the 'BD-Live' function; a tool for interacting with other Blu-ray users and downloading new content online.