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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."
Why did the article submitter link to test.wikipedia.org, I wonder? Here's the real article, with 5x the information on the format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
With all that storage George Lucas will still find a way to re-re-re-release the bastardized Star Wars movies one-per BluRay disc and people will still buy them. "More Ewoks! More pouty Anaki! More lifelike JarJar! All in THX certified Dolby Megadigital 24+3 Digital Sound!"
Trolling is a art,
For the nth time people, there are no cartridges.
I've been on /. too long... I originally read the title as "HP Hacks Blu-Ray Disc Technology", and my first response was "I wonder how they did it."
Yes, the drive can read AND write the standard DVD format. It's in the article.
you might as well ship them all to me for enviro-friendly disposal. message me and i'll give you my PO Box.
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.
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
BS means bachelor of science.
CS110 is a beginners entry level computer programming course.
The implication is that whether you are an expert on computers or not, you can use this product.
Unknown host pong.
It's backwards compatible in the same way DVDs are compatible with CDs. You will need a new drive to read these new disks, but the new drives will contain lasers for reading CDs and DVDs as well.
If you mean backwards compatible video format, then it depends on the players hardware and not on the drive. HD-DVD has MPEG2 in the spec. MPEG2 is what DVDs use. So they will still work assuming the MPAA doesn't try to pull a fast one.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
Whoever hits the shelves first with a 200$ 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.
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.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
In short, NO.
The DVD and CDRW units use a 'red' laser, where's blueray uses a (get this) blue laser.
Because of this, the whole focus/pit-size differences ensure that the units will not be able to read DVD/CDR. Though I'm sure someone will make a unit which supports both.
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.
Ahh and when they arrive you'll then have to wait for the ones that can record 500Gb on "DVD's"... so how is your 486 going these days?! :-)
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
HP has to back SOMETHING. The trick with Technology is that you have to stand behind a product, push it, and hope that consumers accept it. If you stand by the wayside, you are bound to be grabbing ticket #4,165,280 (ficticious) at Bankruptcy court.
Technology, especially for home theaters(as one poster put it), Will always be moving forward. But it is not the baby steps that make the majority change, it's the leaps and bounds.
A VCR to a DVD = Better picture, sound, content, and navigation. It was innovation. Blu-Ray is the equivalant of buying a 3Ghz Computer for your grandmother to browse the web and read email with.
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
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.
Lightscribe has been talked about for a few years now. Similar to the Yamaha technology, except you're not using the data layer for drawing; it's a dye on the other side of the disc that you will be burning.
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.