While manufacturers slash prices in a bid to spark Blu-Ray sales, many analysts are predicting that sales of the hardware will not take off until the middle of next year.

Sony is planning to lower the retail price for its half-height internal Blu-ray Disc (BD) optical disc drive (ODD), the BDU-X105, to US$49.99. However according to the analysts spoken too by Digitimes it is not enough as there is still a big gap in prices between DVD drives and Blu-Ray.

Taiwan-based ODD makers think that in PC's the use of Blu Ray drives will not be popular in the global market at least until the second half of 2010.

They note that the proportion of BD models in PCs is growing slowly from from 0.9 per cent  in 2008 to 5.9 per cent in 2009.  They predict it will be 16.3 per cent by 2013.