News of Blu-ray Disc Drives

Another Blu-ray supporter takes the middle ground...

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArtic ... LG-DVD.xml

Unlike HP, it doesn't sound like Microsoft is influencing LG. I have a feeling this is due to the patent sharing deal they have with Toshiba and/or that they're rumored to be working on a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD drive.

Kudos to Sony for making it first to releasing an HD content ready recordable disc:
Clicky

But what do we do with it if we don't have a drive to burn it?? :o

Here's the list of titles from Sony and Lion's Gate so far. I'm sure other companies will be releasing theirs this week.

Sony

May 23
50 First Dates
The Fifth Element
Hitch
House of Flying Daggers
A Knight's Tale
The Last Waltz
Resident Evil Apocalypse
XXX

June 13
Kung Fu Hustle
Legends of the Fall
Robocop
Stealth
Species
S.W.A.T.
The Terminator

Summer 2006
Underworld Evolution

Lionsgate

May 23
Crash - $39.99
Lord of War ...

There has been quite some fuzz about recomendations needed for the next generation systems and all weird stuff is showing up.

The following info was taken from C't 4 -6-2-2006 and translated by me:

Minimum for the NEC HD DVD player and samsungs blu ray player:
Pentium 4 3,0 GHz (or Athlon 3000+) and a 128 mb videocard.
Samsungs recommends Geforce 7800 or a ATI radeon X1800 for speeding up decoding of h.264/AVC or VC1. ...

heise online has a short look at the Pioneer BDR-101. AACS wasn't implemented yet but it sounds like the drive was otherwise fully functional.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/69396

Since the read head of the Pioneer BDR-101 works with only one lens, one did without the support of CDs. In the test we could for the first time burn a once recordable Bd-r of TDK. The BD-R blank has a capacity of 22,56 ...

And they're not going to be cheap. Wholesale prices are going to be $17.95 for catalog (old) titles and $23.45 for new releases.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060208/tc_nm/bluray_dc

Catalog Blu-ray disc titles will wholesale for $17.95, about the same as DVDs when that format hit the market in 1997. New-release Blu-ray discs will wholesale for $23.45, a premium of 15%-20% over what suppliers were charging for new theatrical DVDs.

Keep in mind these ...

Yep, Heise has gotten their hands on NEC's upcoming HD DVD-ROM, the HR-1100A.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/68949

The drive doesn't seem to be nearly as polished as it should be considering its supposed to be released in a couple of months.

Assuming you were to buy an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive for a PC, looking mainly from the data storage persepective, at what price point would you be willing to buy one?
I remember buying my first DVD burner (2x, -R/-RW only) for $420 Cdn. back in Dec. 2002. I burned maybe 30-40 DVDs in all of 2003, looking back at it now I don't think it was worth it. ...

Heise got their hands on a preproduction sample of Samsung's Blu-ray writer. Here's part of their preview (translated from German):

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/68839

The drive assembly can already describe Blu ray Discs. CDs and DVDs read it only. The sales version is to be able to burn it however also. Samsung supplied a special version of Nero with the version number 7.0.4. With this it succeeded to us to describe a ...

It looks like we've had our first look at a BluRay MID code finally! Many thanks to Wesociety of CDFreaks for his unveiling:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/250/6

If you look at the first picture on the page, you'll see the MID is listed as SONY 001. We also see that this is a rewritable disc (BD-RE).

We should be seeing more MID codes appearing in the next couple months, but I think ...