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HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Coming Soon to PCs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-that-there's-anything-to-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Yahoo! news piece has some sales details for the upcoming Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. They also have some details on disc drives that read the new formats." From the article: "Sony has priced its first desktop computer that will have a Blu-ray Disc burner. The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively and 50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively. The Vaio RC will be launched in 'early summer' and will cost around $2300. At the CeBIT show in Germany last week, Sony announced plans for a Vaio notebook with a Blu-ray Disc drive."

13 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. wow... what a bargain by loraksus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively.

    Is is just me that thinks selling media for 2x the cost of a hard drive (if you calculate $/gig) stupid?

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    1. Re:wow... what a bargain by fatduck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Especially when USB hard drives are roughly the same size as, and far more resistant to damage than, dvds?

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    2. Re:wow... what a bargain by Sinbios · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Media prices drop fast. When DVD was first introduced it was about the same price; look how much a blank DVDR costs now. And besides, media takes up less space. If I have 2.5 terabytes of data I can store it in a spindle of 50GB BD. On the other hand you'll have five 500GB harddrives sitting around. Lastly, media is more convenient; if you have five IDE drives, you have to shutdown the computer, replace the drive, and boot back up to get at content on a different disk; if you have five SATA drives, you still have to open up the case, unplug, and plug the new drive in; if you have a RAID array it's going to be on all the time and using electricity, as well as degrading. With media, you can just pop the old one out and the new one in. And besides, harddrives won't work nicely with your TV.

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    3. Re:wow... what a bargain by dark_requiem · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You have to remember that when any new technology comes out, it is ridiculously expensive. Only when it starts to see reasonably widespread adoption will the costs be reduced to an affordable level. Prior to that, the market is too small to make a profit at what most of us consider "reasonable" prices. Early adopters pay a high price for having the latest and greatest, the rest of us wait to see which standard become dominant, then wait for prices to fall. If either HD-DVD or Blue Ray are recieved well by consumers, prices for that particular format will begin to drop to resonable levels as manufacturers increase their output, and will eventually (within a few years) be comparable with current DVD+/-R prices.

    4. Re:wow... what a bargain by Hao+Wu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What scares me is the thought of a $48 or $60 coaster, if I dare to get a speck of dust on it before burning (... or whatever causes most failures).

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    5. Re:wow... what a bargain by LordVader717 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You might have a few viable arguments there, but you seem to be greatly overestimating the capacity of Blu-Ray. Assuming you use the 50 gig versions, you have five times the space of a dual-layer DVD for how many times the price exactly?

      Films are now commonly stored on hard drives anyway. Not really an advantage to switch to blu-ray.

      For me, the next generation of DVDs is just to small a jump for me to jump the band wagon.
      The leap from floppy's to CDs was huge and from CDs to DVDs large. But the only reason I could think of for supporting Blu-Ray would be because of high-definition movies, and the only reason for that is that studios don't want to offer DIVX compression on regular DVDs.

      The talk about holographic versatile discs (Storage of hundreds of Gigabytes) has got me more interested than the imminent release of BVD/HDDVD.

      Without significant advantages, I would say that the better medium would be the one that maintains the reliability and compatability of existing technology while offering an advancement at a cheap price. At the moment that seems to be HDDVD.

  2. DVD vs. BlueRay by cskrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    4.7 GB for $0.30 or 25 GB for $20

    Sounds alot like the price that DVD(+-)R media was introduced at. Part of me is cringing from sticer shock but realistically I know that in a few years they'll be in the sub $1.00 range when other manufacturers figure out how to make them.

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  3. Oh, the name! by Godji · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The drive will be able to write to 25GB and 50GB BD-RE (rewritable) and BD-R (write once) discs. Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively

    Why the hell didn't they call the rewriteable discs BD-RW?! Has anyone heard of the work "consistency"? Now I have to explain to everyone that BD-RE is like CD-RW or DVD-RW, but for Blue Ray. Great work on the customer confusion front!

  4. Re:Why are rewritables cheaper than writeonceables by AwaxSlashdot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Different technology so different material and production process so different prices (production cost is not the only parameter to determine sell price: offer/demand/strategy also influence the price).
    The question then becomes: why buy writeonce while writemulitple is cheaper ? Well, sometimes people might want that the media won't be rewritten onto, I think.

    AWX

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  5. Your kidding right? by grungefade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can already see this new format going the way of many past failures (ie. Laser Disk, Beta, Minidisk).

    The timing just isnt right. Consumers are not ready to start embracing a new technology when they just barely started embracing dvds. Lots of people have just begun moving their entire collection to dvd. Yes there were early adopters of dvd, but for the majority it has only been a few years. To introduce a new and improved format so soon will only make consumers realize what a sham it is. By making them have to buy the movies they have already bought a second time (maybe 3rd).

    This new generation isnt revolutionary. Its not a big enough improvement to get an entire industry to switch. And 5 years from now 50GB is going to look very small.

    We need a new standard that can not only support our needs now, but that can sustain them for many years to come.

    Lets see... to get 400GB(rewritable) in discs would be $480.
    For a decent 400GB hard drive today, around $225.

    Already does this seem yesterdays technology.... and this is supposed to sustain us for many years?

    1. Re:Your kidding right? by westlake · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I can already see this new format going the way of many past failures (ie. Laser Disk, Beta, Minidisk).
      The timing just isnt right. Consumers are not ready to start embracing a new technology when they just barely started embracing dvds. Lots of people have just begun moving their entire collection to dvd...

      An estimate posted on Slashdot the other day put HDTV in 8-15% of households. No matter how inflated, these numbers look pretty damn impressive.

      RCA Color TV entered the U.S. market in 1954. It took ten years for color to become mass-market and RCA was out there alone.

      In one jump, consumers are moving to large-screen, wide-screen projection, high-definition digital video and digital television sound, as standard.

      DVD videos look grand on your 27" screen. But not so hot at twice that size.

    2. Re:Your kidding right? by Xugumad · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Can't find the article you're talking about, so here's another (which claims the numbers are 15% of US households):

      http://www.digitaltvdesignline.com/howto/showArtic le.jhtml?articleID=178601629

      I can't comment on other countries, but as an example, the UK has only had HDTV sources since late 2005. Sky, the most popular television platform, has not even launched its HDTV service yet! Suffice to say, we don't have a lot of HDTVs yet!

      Lets move on to another point... " RCA Color TV entered the U.S. market in 1954. It took ten years for color to become mass-market and RCA was out there alone."
      Erm, so? If you're trying to make a point about how long it took color to become mass-market in comparison to HDTV, it would really help if you had a date when HDTV televisions became available in the US?

      "In one jump, consumers are moving to large-screen, wide-screen projection, high-definition digital video and digital television sound, as standard." - Erm, what? The numbers say nothing more than they have televisions that can show HDTV. Case in point, my 26" HDTV. Also, I'd hardly consider 15% to be "as standard".

      "DVD videos look grand on your 27" screen. But not so hot at twice that size."

      Tried with an unscaling DVD player? No, its still not quite as good as a pure HD source, but at a cost of $100, compared to $1000+ and buying all my DVDs again, want to guess what I'm doing for the forseeable future?

  6. Re:Not anywhere near the success of "old" DVD... by Eivind · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I disagree with the size-comment: People could and would send their entire mp3 or divx-collection around on a single disc if it would fit. 10GB on a DVD is plenty for a movie, but too small for a movie-collection.

    But the benefit over DVD is quite small. going from CDROM to DVD gives you 10 times as much storage. Going from DVD to 1.st gen blu-ray gives you not even a factor of 3 -- and the price gets multiplied by like 50. Not worth it.

    As someone said: at these prices, why buy 3 50GB blu-ray writables for $180 (and total capacity 150GB) sometime in the future when you even *today* can get a external-usb harddrive with 3 times the capacity, faster read/write, better compatibility, and lower defect-rate for less.

    OK, so the bluray-discs are going to cost less air-freigth, that's about the only benefit I see.

    But the intro-prices won't hold long anyway, I'm sure the $50/disc will fall, like all other optical media before it, by an order of magnitude in a year or two, and by two orders of magnitude as the format matures.