Sony's 400-disc BDP-CX7000ES Blu-ray Mega Changer reportedly coming soon

There's no doubt that Sony has a 400-disc Blu-ray Mega Changer on the cooker -- heck, we saw the thing last year at CEDIA -- but up until now, there's been no indication of its nearness to market. According to a vague Swiss product page and a report from Sony Insider, however, the launch date is indeed drawing near. If hunches prove legitimate, the BDP-CX7000ES will allow 400 of your favorite BD flicks to sit within a single console, and we've every reason to believe that this one will support BD-Live and actually load films with some amount of haste. You know, very much unlike the 200-disc HES-V1000 that's already out there. As of now, it's looking like the unit will run right around $2,300, placing it squarely in rarefied air and ostensibly out of reach for the vast majority of home theater junkies.

[Via Sony Insider]

[skyzbig @ May 21st 2009 5:01AM]

And people wonder why Sony are losing money...

[nerdtalker @ May 21st 2009 5:06AM]

I have to honestly wonder; are there even 400 BD movies out yet? I mean, good ones?

[darkmax @ May 21st 2009 5:46AM]

They should really cut the fat cheques of those over-fed over-paid old men in Japan HQ

[Shinigami @ May 21st 2009 6:54AM]

Even if there are 400 blu-ray disks, the thing costs $2300 but how much for 400 disks? $8000? $20 per disk. So its actually $10,000. Less expensive than filling iPod ;) but still too much for me. Besides, I have the usual question: why?

[SSS @ May 21st 2009 7:37AM]

were people buying the cd equivalent of these in the 80s?

[AJ in the East Bay @ May 21st 2009 9:36AM]

@Shinigami,

I think you were being nice pricing those Blu-ray movies at $20.

[Randy Bucknell @ May 21st 2009 1:31PM]

@SSS

They were called jukeboxes.

[Spark @ May 21st 2009 5:45PM]

I hope there is a "microwave this shit" button for the oven, I mean disc changer.
You know when the feds raid the apartment looking for illicit DVD rips.

[nintendo fanboy hater @ May 21st 2009 5:02AM]

How dare they place it squarely in rarefied air and ostensibly out of reach for the vast majority of us home theater junkies.

[damn im so emo @ May 22nd 2009 2:18AM]

this is why i say "digital download". i mean seriously, wtf....

[Erwos @ May 21st 2009 5:07AM]

The $2300 figure was derived by looking at a foreign price... it's likely to be a lot cheaper, even for the ES version.

[Duke @ May 21st 2009 2:12PM]

Its still going to be a waste. Do that many people really need space for 400 BR discs? I doubt it. Heck, large changers are annoying anyway. I had one for 200 cd's a while back and found it was much easier to load one disc at a time than it was to mess with each disc's location in a changer.

[Boards of Canada @ May 21st 2009 5:10AM]

For real Home Theater Junkies (HTJ), 2000$ is nothing. Nothing at all.

[A.C.E.R. @ May 21st 2009 5:12AM]

lol @ $10,000 worth of BDs sitting in this thing. but seriously, it's not all that ridiculous. imagine loading it up, having it automatically scan the discs and build a catalogue of all your titles with different ways to sort/search for your movie. could be pretty nice....you know, if you have 400 freakin BDs.

[hulse_kevin @ May 21st 2009 12:08PM]

Yes it COULD be nice. Except when has a device like this
ever lived up to it's full potential. Just the haphazard way in
which certain DVD's are put together means that some
content will always be a bother. IOW, you're better off just
ripping it.

The entire industry is stuck in the 80s.

The same bulk of random access disk storage will become
affordable to the average consumer before this thing does.

Many of us already have disk arrays this size (or larger if
you count by disks and not by bulk). That ship already
sailed. Frys is selling the sails.

[ArcticFox @ May 21st 2009 5:19AM]

Would be cheaper just to buy a HTPC and put a load of 1Tb HDDs in.

[Mitch @ May 21st 2009 5:39AM]

400 disks = Up to 20TB. 20TB + HTPC hardware would be EASILY more than this unit...

[Marcus @ May 21st 2009 7:10AM]

You can overwrite data on a hard drive.

[hexydes @ May 21st 2009 9:46AM]

@Mitch: Most of the space on a Blu-ray disc is wasted on either extras, bloated MPEG-2-encoded video, or just empty space. If you rip a Blu-ray disc to an H.264-based MKV or MP4, even at 1080p, the resulting file is usually only 8-10GB. So while the total theoretical storage capacity of 400 Blu-ray discs might be 20TB, to actually store the movies on disc is more realistically only around 4TB, at most. Just buy 3-4 1.5TB drives, plop them on your network media server, build a HTPC, and you're all set. Much cheaper than this pile of garbage (and much more accessible, to boot).

[RN @ May 21st 2009 7:48PM]

@hexydes: Virtually every Blu-ray is already H.264 or VC-1 so any transcoding will only yield space savings by lowering the video bitrate and degrading image quality. Sure the extras take up some space, but many people actually like to use the extras.

[Jon @ May 21st 2009 5:23AM]

the ultra mad jukebox for the 10s. (as in 2010s)...

Is this thing really necessary though? I'd sort 400 BDs on a lovely BD cupboard/stand/cabinet. coz since the BD movies come in disc boxes you still got to put them somewhere.

[David @ May 21st 2009 5:34AM]

Why 400 bluray disks it probably reads dvd and cds too. So you can put your full 400 disks movie collection in it.

[Duke @ May 21st 2009 2:15PM]

I can use a Bentley as a crib too if I wanted, but having sense to not blow ridiculous amounts of money on unnecessary things stops me. What I mean is, if you wanted a device for other media it would come at a cheaper entry point.

[loopyoyo @ May 21st 2009 5:30AM]

stupid to charge that much more.. the damn thing can only play one disc at a time for goodness sakes!

[t @ May 21st 2009 5:38AM]

Here we go again. Sony always pulls a mega changer out it's ass.
Maybe they should focus on what is really kicking ass in the market place like hand held internet devices. Oh, yeah they have that disgrace called the MYLO or whatever and the more, much more, ipod touch just owns that lil shit.
Oh well at least they have great tvs, the ps3 and psp(worth it b/c of monster hunters).
Sony who?

[Boards of Canada @ May 21st 2009 6:18AM]

Chiba. Sonny Chiba. And he will kick your ass if you make fun of japanese technology again.

[gadgety @ May 21st 2009 5:44AM]

5 Years down the line. 400 disks inside and the friggin' carousel stops. Been there, done that.

[Ty Morgan @ May 21st 2009 10:19AM]

Yeah, I had a Sony 400 disc DVD changer that would randomly scratch the hell out of my discs while loading them. No thanks.

[BOGRASH @ May 21st 2009 6:53AM]

sony are done. the consumer age is done. sayonara robocop.

[johnhkester @ May 21st 2009 7:07AM]

Can we assume/do we know that this will upconvert DVDs to 1080p as well? The current sony DVD changer only upconverts to 1080i.

[chapanelli2000 @ May 21st 2009 7:32AM]

If this is built anyway like the 400 disc DVD players Sony made then it will stop working in about 1-2 years after you buy it. The DVD players version was cost effective at around $400 and a decent player when it worked but they kept failing.

[Indefinite Implosion @ May 21st 2009 8:12AM]

This would be awesome if you can put it somewhere hidden away connected to a media server and have it so you can simultaneously stream several movies to several places around your home at the same time..
ahh... one can dream....

[Nicole @ May 21st 2009 8:46AM]

Oh, I can hear it now. The MPAA now officially has an excuse why you never need to format shift to put your discs on a media server.

[chefgon_ign @ May 21st 2009 8:48AM]

Make a five disc changer and you'd have my Blu-ray collection covered.

[tobz1000 @ May 21st 2009 9:18AM]

I'd rather buy a 10TB server and software to rip/read 400 BD images.

[r3loaded @ May 21st 2009 9:30AM]

Even better, rip the BDs to MKV format with AVC encoding. Allowing for 10GB a film, you only need 4TB.

[bdav @ May 21st 2009 10:21AM]

I'll give the cost of this 400 changer to someone who can make me something to automatically rip a whole pile of DVDs/BluRays. Can't be much harder can it? I'm sure it would be infinitely more usefull - rip entire music, dvd and blu-ray collection without any of the painfull disc swapping.

[hexydes @ May 21st 2009 11:17AM]

Is it really that hard to use AnyDVD HD and RipBot264 to convert to MKV? Sure it might take a while, but it's not like you're actually sitting there watching it.

[Maximun2k10 @ May 22nd 2009 5:47AM]

Just download it! A lot more easier... :D

[Blaine @ May 21st 2009 10:39AM]

What most of you likely don't realize is that these types of things are hooked up to HTPC-like front end systems for large home theatre installations. This is a consumer gadget site, but that's the primary use of these changers.and $2500 (this) + $2000 (controller) is crazy cheap compared to the HD-based options out there.

[hulse_kevin @ May 21st 2009 12:13PM]

OTOH, any somewhat competent "consumer" with a PC can already replicate the same thing for a lot cheaper.

The main thing lacking in the dirt cheap PC solution is storage space and that
continues to get bigger and cheaper. HDTV is already a pain in the neck. If you
are "geeky" enough to understand what's going on with an overpriced home theatre
system, you can throw together a "media center" box.

Once PC's become less TV hostile and more akin to their ancient Amiga and Atari
cousins, this pairing of TV And computer technology will be even more trivial and
more obvious to the common man of the ipod generation.

[dmv76 @ May 21st 2009 11:39AM]

hopefully streaming services will get better and we wont have to use anymore formats. kind of like not printing documents. later we are all going to ask why would anyone need to save, rip, burn discs, with good streaming services.

[Paul @ May 21st 2009 12:16PM]

The problem with the old SD-DVD version of this thing is that the interface is totally useless, if you were to scan though the whole catalog of DVDs on it, it would take you like 2-4 hours (I have a spreadsheet that lists all the DVD's slot #s), if they actually make a nice interface for it, then it could be worth while (assuming the price comes to earth). As for ripping the BRDs, that's great, if it was really practical, it's a huge amount of data to store, and if you don't want to rip it again when you have an HD failure, you're going to want to have some kind of redundancy, and eventually someone is going to update the DRM on BRDs and then you're going to have to figure out the whole ripping process over again.

Overall, I'm of the mind that if you have the skill to setup a system to rip and store all the BRDs that this thing holds, and you invest the time and skill it takes to put that system together into a job using the same skill set (in perhaps a better economy) you would probably come out able to buy this thing anyway, and then not have to worry about DRM/HD failure/not having all the features, etc.

If you want to campaign the MPAA et al, to make it easier for someone to make a nice, elegant solution to this, well, that's another story.

[xstex @ May 21st 2009 1:02PM]

For the fat American?

[letstakeawalk @ May 21st 2009 3:29PM]

Let's see, a Japanese company makes a product, which has it's info posted on an obscure Swiss webpage...

yep, it's always about the fat Americans. Ever get tired of being the stereotypical stereotyper?

[letstakeawalk @ May 21st 2009 3:29PM]

*its

[bandigolo @ May 21st 2009 1:21PM]

Or you could get off your lazy ass and change discs manually. Seriously, how many movies does a person need to watch each day to get any benefit from this thing?

[Timta2 @ May 21st 2009 4:07PM]

Just wanted to point out that this is the ES series which has historically been Sony's higher end product. It is possible we could see a cheaper model that isn't ES in the future.

[ric @ May 21st 2009 4:31PM]

this just kind of points out how irrelevant optical media's become, doesn't it? I remember the CD equivalent they used to do, and how irate a friend who shelled out for one was when I tipped up with a Toshiba Libretto loaded up with MP3s at his party...plus I could do visuals via the VGA connector to his projector...!

[Gin @ May 21st 2009 4:52PM]

Why would you EVER stuff a big black box full with 400 BD-discs. Who is buying this?!