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HP Backs Blu-ray Disc Technology
neutron_p writes "Finally HP announced plans to include Blu-ray Disc drives across many of its product lines, including select consumer desktop and notebook PCs, personal workstations and digital entertainment centers. They will start selling PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives in late 2005. An optical disc technology, Blu-ray Disc is poised to replace current DVD technology and become the next standard for personal computing data storage and viewing high-definition movies. More than 70 of the world's leading technology and entertainment companies have committed to the Blu-ray Disc format. Recently, Sharp unveiled Blu-ray disc recorder with Hard Drive/DVD which will be introduced on the Japanese market in December."
Yes, you can still play your DVDs. Heck, you can still use your DVD player to play your DVDs; it won't self-destruct if you buy a Blu-ray player.
I'll say this slowly....
not...
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Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ drive and ~$1 media will be the one that gets adopted.
That's how it's always been, really, from Beta v VHS to DVD-R vs DVD+R, the latter of which resolved itself by having everything read/write everything else (+/- is pretty much irrelevant).
That's how it will be with the next gen. Whoever gets their stuff out there will get bought.
The PC market desperately needs some sort of cheap media that stores in the 10s of gigs. Even if it's only useful as an affordable/practical backup/archive system for home users.
By the time I could afford a DVD-R, it's paltry 4.5 gigs was too small to be useful backing up 160gigs of drives.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
People have an investment in the players, companies have an investment in production of the drives, recordable units are begining to get cheap enough to displace VCRs, and people are happy with DVD. Seriously dvd video is good enough on any type of tv for my eyesight, that is similar to most americans. Blu-ray has a future in data storage as our requirenments continue to grow, but it will be 10 years before we hear about renting a blu disc, unless they make it ubiquitus, cheap, and prove its superiority.
1. 4.5 gigs just isn't enough storage space to be a viable backup medium. plenty of people have posted about this.
2. DVD video just doesn't scale. Sure, dvds look great on your 10 year old 30" behemoth tv set in the den, but try watching them on a new million inch HDTV... you can see with your own eyes that the MPEG2 compression just isn't so great. even with fancy progressive scanning and other image enhancement algorithms, the quality just isn't there especially when compared to higher resolution HDTV. whats needed is less compression and higher resolution video. and that requires more storage space. HD-DVD is one solution and Blue Ray is another. which spec is better is an academic debate for another post.
you want to know where the early adoption will be? home theatre. not computers.
AFAIK the only software yet to come on DVD so far are certain Linux distros. Reguardless that dvd drives can be bought for less than 20 dollars nowdays. Games typically can span 3-5 cd's and they still say they do not want to distribute on DVD. Course if they didnt have to pack a thick CD set they could put more copies of the same product on the shelf in a slimmed up packaging.
And with Blue-Ray coming out it wont make much of a difference if the distribution channels still stick with CDROM.
I think I need to popularise a law dictating the truth about backups and medium used for them. Henceforth, It shall be called Bill's Law:
By the time backup media that is large enough to back up your current hard drive is cheap, you will have upgraded to a new hard drive with a capacity such that it will no longer be practical to back up with that media.
Ok the phrasing needs some work, but thats certainly been mycase. When I had a hard drive that was only four gigs, cd-r's looked perfect. It would only take six of them. By the time I got one I had a 30 gig hard drive. But then it looks like dvd-r's will work as a back up. By the time I get one my hard drive is 250 gigs. So by the time I get a Recordable Blue Ray that stores 500 gigs I'm sure I'll have a 30 terrabye drive.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The increase in storage from a DVD to either of these blue laser format optical disks is simply insufficient to make it worth while. From a CD to a DVD was a 10 fold increase in storage. From a DVD to a blue laser based disk is only around three times the capacity.
This is just not worth the effort and cost, especially when there are holographic alternatives in development that have the potential to offer over 100 times the storage capacity of a DVD.