Blu-ray Tips

Sony and Pioneer have announced a few new products with Blu-ray available.

Pioneer has announced that they’ve begun shipping their first Blu-ray computer drive - the BDR-101A. The street price for this device is running around $1000. The neat thing about this drive is that it can burn single layer Blu-ray discs (25GB). It should be noted that this burner can’t burn 50GB discs, and also that it cannot read or write DVD-RAM discs. Buying a blank media disc isn’t for the faint of heart though, with 25GB discs costing around $25 and 50GB discs costing $60 (once released). Hopefully, this drive isn’t prone to making coasters.

Sony has announced two new computers, a laptop and a desktop, capable of playing Blu-ray discs. The desktop - the VAIO RC204 - is a monsterous computer, featuring a 600GB hard-drive, a 3.2GHZ Core Duo processor, a GeForce 7600GT, and a Blu-ray drive. The computer also comes bundled with video software like Adobe Premiere and sofware by Roxio. Of course, this computer doesn’t come cheap - the estimated price for this computer is $3400.

Sony also released the VAIO AR190G - a 17″ notebook and the first to include a Blu-ray drive. The laptop also includes a 2ghz Core Duo processor, and a GeForce Go video card. You’ll also find HDMI and firewire ports on this laptop. It even includes a webcam built in. Again, at $3500, it’s not cheap, but you’d probably be the first on the block to have a Blu-ray drive, and even if you don’t use the Blu-ray features, it’s still a powerful multimedia notebook.

Sony has started producing it’s blu-ray discs.   Currently, Sony has a capacity of 750,000 Blu-ray discs per month.  Right now, Sony is only producing the 25GB Blu-ray discs.   By October Sony is expecting to increase their production to over 5 million discs per month.  Also, as they add additional manufacturing lines, they will begin to product the 50GB Blu-ray discs.

Now that HD-DVD has been out for a few weeks, and with Blu-ray’s launch coming closer, I’ve got more details on how the HD-DVD format has been working for people.  So far - it’s OK.

So unless you need to be on the cutting edge of technology, this is probably a format war you don’t need to join.  I would wait until 1) the new 1080p televisions are available 2) HD-DVD can actually output to a 1080p (currently it’s max is 1080i) 3) There are more movies available 4) The price of the players comes down and 4) there’s a player that will play both format - HD-DVD and Blu-ray.