News of Blu-ray Disc Drives

For awhile now, I have be wondering how good (or bad) older movies would look when transferred to HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc.

This weekend I sat down and had a viewing of Blazing Saddles (1974) on HD DVD. There must have been some digital restoration and color retouching, because this film looked amazing. Many of the scenes had extremely vibrant colors, which made the picture pop out of the HDTV. The picture quality on ...

With everyone getting excited about GoWell and Funai, I remembered that Lite-On unveiled their own players at last year's IFA. The BDP-X1 Blu-ray Disc and HDP-Z1 HD DVD players were supposed to ship during the first half of 2007, but considering I have heard little about them since IFA, I don't think that's going to happen.

Anyone know what happened? Did they get dropped with the rest of Lite-On's settop line?

Looks like Funai has finally thrown their weight behind a format in the HiDef format wars, and they have chosen Blu-Ray:

Japan's Funai to launch 42-inch LCD TV and BD player in N. America, says paper

Compiled from outside sources by Lisa Tsai; Emily Chuang, DIGITIMES


Japan-based Funai Electric plans to launch a 42-inch full high-definition (HD) LCD TV and next-generation Blu-ray Disc (BD) player in North America in fall, according ...

"Scissors beat paper, VHS beats Betamax, Blu-Ray beats HD-DVD"

Stone beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and VHS beats Betamax. Those are the rules of the game that is played by consumer electronics companies everywhere. In a recent comment on Apple, I suggested that Apple is a consumer electronics company and doesn't care much for open standards. It's true and neither do Sony and Toshiba. Rather than collaborate on the next standard for high capacity DVD ...

HD DVD group shrugs off Blockbuster announcement

Graffeo pointed out that rental counted for less than one percent of its revenue and brushed it off as an insignificant event in the format war.

Here's another interesting claim

Graffeo claimed that only 30 percent of PS3s in the US are connected to an HDTV.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/21 ... ter_move/1

In a move that *I* at least found surprising, Robin Harris of ZDNet has come out declaring Blu-Ray the winner of the format war, and that it is now safe to buy a Blu-Ray player:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=149

At the same time, another (very small) studio who deals with HiDef documentaries has declared Blu-Ray exclusivity:
http://www.exoptron.com/

http://www.twice.com/index.asp?layout=a ... =CA6453379

Panasonic's Taylor Outlines Views On Blu-ray, Flat Panel
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 6/20/2007 8:00:00 AM
UPDATE! Secaucus, N.J. — Joseph Taylor, executive VP/COO of Panasonic Corporation of North America, said Blu-ray has won the HD disc format battle and indicated while the company is still solidly behind plasma, LCD may get more attention.

Those were just two of the issues Taylor discussed in an exclusive ...

Continuing with the rapid release of good news for the Blu-Ray camp, it seems that the BD+ copy protection system is now finally completed:
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=268

Although many people will find this annoying if they want to back up or pirate Blu-Ray movies, it also means that paranoid studios like Fox will be more secure in releasing movies on the format.

It will deffinately be interesting to see how this ...

i feel so bad for asking such a question. But are their any Blu-ray burners that are widely available that are 50GB burners and sata.

I have only seen the Sony one around a store and of course that is PATA. I am possibly going be doing some HD recording and 2hrs won't be long enough, and i do have a PATA spot on my motherboard but it is actually a RAID controller, so i'd ...

With Toshiba always boasting about their efforts to get Chinese manufacturers to make HD DVD players, it comes as something of a surprise to see that the first drive listed with actual specs for either of these formats, actually belongs to Blu-Ray!
http://www.gowellent.net/product%20web/ ... /G875.html

¡¤Support Blu-ray driver
¡¤USB 2.0 interface(high speed) & card reader
¡¤Support SD/MMC/MS/XD card
¡¤Support 1G NAND Flash
¡¤DISC Playable: Blu-ray disc /H.264/MPEG4/DivX/XviD/DVD/SVCD/VCD/CD/MP3 /Kodak
Picture/Photo ...