Forworld Electronics, a Taiwan-based maker of optical disc players, is selling a self-produced Blu-ray Disc (BD) player under its own brand Pony in the Taiwan market at NT$9,990 (US$319), much lower than prices for BD players offered by Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer and Samsung, according to the Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News (EDN).
Forworld uses Sony-produced loaders and SigmaTel-made chipsets for the player, EDN pointed out. In order to further reduce production costs, other Taiwan-based makers plan to use loaders for BD-ROM drives produced by Lite-On IT and chipsets produced by MediaTek to produce white-box BD players, EDN indicated.