So hopefully this means we'll be seeing entry level players in the $200 price range.

I don't know if this chip will drive down player prices or simply react to the competition, cutting it's price due to pressures. It sounds like an expensive chip!

Development costs will undoubtedly be high, but sell this chip in volume then the development costs can quite easily be recovered.

Single chip solutions generally means lower costs to build a complete system around the chip. So i would guess this chip should drive down prices of players.

All this depends on large numbers of BD players being sold. Anyone seen any evidence of that lately?

Not all markets are ready for HD and one of them is Greece, but there is nothing wrong with the price going down, and if nec can make this first step i am sure that other will follow, after that it should be a matter of time before we see a rise of BD player.

CDan sez:

"All this depends on large numbers of BD players being sold. Anyone seen any evidence of that lately?"

Agreed. I think they may have solved an non existent "problem".

NEC will have a hard time pushing this chip to BD manufacturers. A possibly new CPU? A possibly new GPU? How do you program these?

Strange as NEC was pro HDDVD. Now they are on track to dominate a section of the blu-ray market. When will Toshiba release the world's best blu-ray player?