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HP Backs Blu-ray Disc Technology

Posted by michael on from the we-have-a-winner dept.

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."

10 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Real Wikipedia Link by RobertB-DC · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Uh oh by PMJ2kx · · Score: 5, Funny
    The drives also will include LightScribe technology, a labeling solution developed by HP that allows silk-screen quality text and graphics to be burned directly onto LightScribe-enabled Blu-ray Discs using the same laser that burns to the data side of the disc.
    There goes the Sharpie pen market!
  3. My cynical side squirms... by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    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,
  4. HP Hacks Blu-Ray by RichDiesal · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."

  5. HD-DVD by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. When are we going to see it on the shelves? by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:When are we going to see it on the shelves? by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 4, Informative
      " (+/- is pretty much irrelevant)."

      Technically there are some differences ...

      +R media has better multisession support. With many sessions, it uses only 2 MB overhead on the disc (per session) for whatever data they use to link sessions. In contract, -R media uses much more data in the border zones. (It varies per session, but 3 sessions will have up to 132 MB of overhead.)

      Most people don't know that a -R disc holds slightly more data than a +R. It's about 5.5 MB. I was astonished when I found out. Go look up the specs and you will see that this is true. This is not too relevant unless you are trying to back up a DVD that has so much data in 1 layer that it goes into this 5.5 MB limit.

      Optical Issues: There are weaknesses in the design of the optical properties. The explanation is long and I really don't understand everything.

  7. May help in choosing formats... by Sensible+Clod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  8. Re:backwards? by inflex · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. why blue ray is necessary by Jrod5000+at+RPI · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.