greets,

any ideas when will first hd-dvd/blu-ray burner appear on the market, how much approx will it cost, and what will media prices be? also the burning speed, etc.

p.s. i tried asking google, but i kinda got limited time atm

thanks

At the moment, Sony is already shipping 23GB Blue Laser optical drives and media. Each disc is single sided and enclosed in a cartridge (like that of DVD-RAM) Both write-once and rewritable media (~10,000 rewrite cycles) are available. It is not clear how much their drives cost, but going by the article I posted back in April, media costs $ 43 per disc In a way, the media pricing seems outrageous, but looks reasonable if compared with professional Jaz media and double-sided DVD-RAM.

Panasonic is also planning to launch a Blu-ray disc standalone recorder at the end of this month. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disc with a capacity of 50GB can hold up to 4.5 hours of HDTV content.

It will probably be another while yet before Blue laser optical drives hit the home user market outside of Japan.

I see - no convenient HDD backups yet then for me

Thanks!

If you mean burner like I think you mean - the kind you put in your computer I would guess no sooner then the end of 2005.

Visit Tokyo to find more. You'll easily find some Blu-ray products on shop shelves at somewhat more realistic prices.

HDDs and DVD+RW/-RW media are not to be compared with Blu-ray directly because the latter has cartridges meant for use ZIP, FDD, and DVD-RAM way. Blu-ray offers more MB per dollar than ZIP, FDD, and DVD-RAM (in cartdriges.) The disc usually costs US$20 at retail, and there are Maxell, TDK, Sony, and a few other sourcess. When Ritek, Prodisc, and CMC start shipping them by the millions, the cost will come down to under US$5 at OEM. The waiting time might be shortened if there are already some user base of Blu-ray PC drives.

well, I guess it'll still take some time to see those devices here in Europe, along with cheap media

And you have to admit that even HDTV sets have rarely been adopted in Europe. For a market to mature and grow, both demand and supply sides are responsible. If there's enough demand for HD-DVD and Blu-ray drives and media in Europe, I am sure there will be enough suppliers to make profits out out of the new rapidly growing market. The technologies for HDTV have been there for a long time, for about 40 years, but people aren't making good use of them yet. Even considering it was only about 15 years ago that HDTV set was first commercialized in Tokyo, the real 1920x1080 digital standard seems to have gone nowhere in Europe. Why should any device manufacturer go into European market to sell their products when the European governments refuse products already widely used? It's all about politics, license, and money. It would have been much different if all those HDTV standards and Blu-ray standards were developed and owned by European companies and controlled by European governments. Europe refused to accept HDTV because it was Japanese technology, didn't it? It will be when European companies themselves have their own HD products to compete against US and Japanese standards that there will be truly an HD era in Europe.

Not only continents and countries, but also competing companies inside a nation rage war on standards. JVC, Toshiba, Sony, Pioneer, Ricoh, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Matsushita, NEC, and other big players in the Japanese electronics industry fight against one another to have a more advantageous role. There is no organization and no power to overrule their decisions with any ease, not even the DVD Forum and RDVDC that are supposed to do that exactly.

He all know what bring DVD Blue-ray prices down -> piracy
No pc drives = no piracy = no mass production = no cheap media

Maybe at 2005...

Hi,

Not entirely sure of how this works but I have a question: Which technology do you think will become the standard and why- HD-DVD, EVD, or Blu-Ray?

thanks

I think it's way too early to make predictions about which products will succeed. Early adopters get screwed anyway, so does it matter?

Don't forget Taiwans Forward Versatile Disks or FVD - Microsoft hasn't

*head explodes*

Is it piracy to take video of your daughter's daily lives and record HDTV programs to Blu-ray like many people have done with VHS and camcorders? You are implying all applications that help HD growth are piracy. In South Korea, it was Worldcup 2002 games that really first made it fo attract millions of average consumers into HD. People suddenly realized that watching Worldcup games in digital HD was better than watching in SD/analogue.

What Microsoft advertises on their website isn't piracy either.

I’m not saying that u can only use blu-ray to piracy, u can do all sort of legal things with it , (not so many, nowadays almost everything is piracy ), but only mass production bring prices down.

For instance it was porno the first big client of VHS.
So u see Blu-ray need a big client, and the problem is that HDTV it's not available everywhere, here at EU it's almost non existent for the major par of the population.
And that is not going to change all of the student.

Now I’m not naive to the point of not knowing what makes the market change.
PC drives could find some clients for data backup (legal and illegal).
I could be one of them.

DVD writers were not that popular in Europe either at first. They were first available in Japan and then United States.

HDTV sets first appeared in Toko, and later digital HDTV sets started appearing everywhere in the US market. That justified most of the largest TV and monitor manucturers to plan investing more than 10 billion Euro in the recent few years.

Pornography isn't piracy either, but just another application for the mass. It's just people's daily lives, neither bad or good. Bikini HD video files are actually some of the first things that arrived at millions of desktop PC hard disks to experiment 1920x1080 HD playing with their latest CPUs and VGAs. They are not exactly pornographical contents but have something to do with sex at least.

The biggest reason why there are so few HDTV in Europe is that no big European electronics company has much interest there. Europe first needs to let its industry grow before leading the world in terms of HD subscription.