HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Coming Soon to PCs

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."

Comments

wow... what a bargain

[loraksus]

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?

Re:wow... what a bargain

[fatduck]

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

Re:wow... what a bargain

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always a nitch market to begin with. The first person I knew who bought a CD recorder was a high end still photographer that was using it to archive files. His first drive cost $5,000. A few years later they were a couple of hundred. I paid $550 for my first DVD burner which I desperately needed at the time. A month later they were $450 and four months later the same one was around $250 but I burned a lot of disks in those months and I still use those back ups. I'm interested as a way of hard copying rendered shots in a digital format. I do it now on DVD but it takes a lot of DVDs and can be a bit clunky. I can store a lot of shots on 50 gig. Even better yet I can store the entire project file on disks of that size. I have to store them on several disks now and it's a bit clunky reinstalling them when needed. I do also use back up external hard drives but I've had failures with hard drives and I've rarely had trouble with disks. Also if you are going to store multiple backs up over time hard drives can take up serious space and can be problematic after they have set for a few years. I had disasterous experiences with Jazz drives in the past. In a hundred DVD folder I can store 5 terrabytes of information. That's a lot of hard drives especially when you consider a 100 gig hard drive holds a lot less than a 100 gig of information. A 50 gig DVD will pretty much hold 50 gig of data. Even with 500 gig drives it'll take eleven or twelve to hold as much as the one folder. Data recovery is extremely expensive if one of those drives goes down. If to be safe you do redundant back ups then you are talking 22+ drives to equal the one folder.

For most it won't make sense in the short term but give it a year when the 50 gig disks are even running $10 a piece and they'll start looking a lot more interesting.

Another issue is say I needed to send 50 gig of info through the mail. I'd much rather send a DVD sized disk than a hard drive that can be easily damaged.

A final note would be mastering films. For low budget producers they could burn a high res version of their film on a high capacity disk rather than using digi beta. Digital Beta decks are still extremely expensive due to the rariety. Blu-ray will be a much cheaper option. Say you want to project your new film at a local theater. All you would need is a single Blu-Ray disk. Instead of a stack of film cans you can put the whole thing on a disk that would fit in a breast pocket.

DVD vs. BlueRay

[cskrat]

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.

Re:DVD vs. BlueRay

[donaldm]

Actually we should not just compare DVD vs Blu-Ray (or HD DVD) on price just yet. What we have here is a capacity comparison. Lets start with the following:

Floppy disk (1.2MB) - yes you can get larger but they are now pretty much obsolete. However they were good for their day. Lets not go into 5.25 inch, 8 inch or even (gasp) 12 inch floppies .

CD (650 - 800MB) - still useful for Music, install software and some backups. Look like hanging around for a long time. I doubt we will see a Music DVD put out by the Music Industry anytime soon.

DVD (4.7GB) - at the moment this media is very cheap (sometimes cheaper than a CD). Dual density is a lot more expensive though. Still 4.7GB is a very useful size (PC and small size backups including movies) although certain companies would like to see this killed off, I personally this won't happen for some time, since there are a lot of DVD/Hard-Disk player/recorders on the market which have really started to kill off VHS recorders. You could probably start a new Slashdot article just on this alone.

HD-DVD (15GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

Blu-Ray (25GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

For HDTV the industry is proposing 15GB to 30GB and this is were the above two fit in. You won't be able to put a HDTV show on standard DVD without some loss (normally considerable) and this is what the Entertainment Industry wants. In addition what is also wanted by the Industry is DRM and the best one will have a definite edge, although the PS3 will be will be the Trojan Horse that puts BluRay in the living room.

Holographic DVD (1.6TB) - http://www.betanews.com/article/Holographic_DVD_to _Hold_16_Terabytes/1133197797 The specs are incredible however I cannot see HDTV being put on this. Where this will shine is in Small to Enterprise backup solutions and this is exactly what it is aiming at. Basically this puts the backup tape industry on notice since it now becomes very possible to have close to "near-line" recovery. Those people who are responsible for serious backups should welcome this.

Please don't come back at me suggesting disks to actually do backups. All I can say to that is try to backup 100TB and put that off-site cheaply, while taking into account possible disaster and recovery scenarios.

Comparing DVD to any of the above is rather silly and as far as costs go, the new media will come down eventually. Even today if you compare RW DVD to Write once DVD you are looking at approx 10 to 1 in cost so if the new disks are say $15 to $20 each for writable only it does not take much effort to imagine what the price of the RW ones would initially be.

Oh, the name!

[Godji]

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!

Could be worse

[CptnHarlock]

They could have called the WriteOnce disks something like "Singlewrite Media" and ended up with "BD-SM".. ;P ..

Cheers...

Your kidding right?

[grungefade]

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?