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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."
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
In the +/- DVD format war, HP backed the slightly-superior-but-not-DVD-forum-approved + format. Now they back the Blu-Ray. HP may have some weird people working for them (certain ones I'd even call wacko), but I'd say they're smart just the same when it comes to choosing the better of two emerging technologies.
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MS and N have both announced their using new proprietery formats. I heard rumblings about HDDVD in XBox 2
Who knows what that means, exactly. It would be too expensive to set up facilities to create a physically different drive and press non-standard discs, who knows what writing technology they'll use.
No doubt it'll be high-capacity.
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