Looks like digital distribution is winning: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/08/28/sony-close-optiarc/1
And yet, noticed how (pre-digital distribution) it was sold to us as "it'll make stuff cost less!" while in reality it has done nothing like that. Obviously I'm discounting Steam sales, as physical retail outlets used to have some good sales years ago. I'm very sad to hear this; I've still got a large library of DVD/CDs that I have no intention of getting rid of - many of the more recent ones with copy protection that makes ripping an image definitely more difficult than it should be. I also quite liked Optiarc drives; they were decently priced, surprisingly well featured and rarely had issues reading/writing discs (in my experience)... ... Wonder how long it'll be before some music labels say it costs too much to produce CDs of their latest and greatest, and go digital only? 'Cause you can guarantee that they won't be providing it in lossless audio.
Whilst my digital download purchases outweigh my optical media purchases by at least 10 to 1, I still like the idea of the DVD Drive and being able to back up to disc, maintain that flexibility or even indulge in some gaming nostalgia from my back collection... The steady march of progress, I suppose...
Not surprised. Sony Optiarc has sold a lot less than manufacturers like Samsung and LG. Possibly because of substandard quality. I had my last Sony Optiarc drive only about a year before it had to be replaced.
Can't say I'm happy to hear this, my own internet connection is only measured in the kilobits per second and I don't look forward to waiting ~10 hours for my games to download
Most of my music & games are digital. But I still rely on Bluray & DVD for all my film & TV & I archive a lot of stuff on DVD every few months.
Samsung doesn't make optical drives any more either, the drives sold as Samsung are made by a spin off / joint venture with a Toshiba spin off (TSST Corp).
Agreed, but just because Sony is dropping out of this market it doesn't mean all optical media and other hardware manufacturers will give up. DVD technology is still ridiculously cheap and overall reliable. Blu ray should be much cheaper - AFAIK, Sony is pretty much the only reason it is so expensive. To give a really dumbed-down summary of blu ray vs DVD, it's just a blue laser (intead of a red one) with an additional lens. As for the discs, those are also pretty much structured the same as DVDs except I think they have an additional layer to them. Regardless, Blu Ray isn't worth over twice the price of DVDs.
This is actually a very important and good point to bring up, I thought about this myself a few months ago when realizing "hmm.... DVDs are starting to phase out". I'm beginning to realize that unless you have riser cards or a large water cooling system, full-towers are becoming less practical because nobody needs more than 1 optical drive and no desktop user needs more hard drives than the average mid-tower capacity. That being said, it is going to get more difficult to make the front of a computer look cool and practical. One way I have accomplished this was I took my old crappy 900Mhz Celeron netbook, diassembled the entire thing, glued a GPU heatsink to it, cut 9" (diagonal) hole in the front of my tower, and mounted the screen to it. The motherboard rested in between the metal of the case and the back of the screen, with maybe 1 cm of extra space above the heatsink. Then I made a program that acted as a high-resolution hardware monitor that is multi-os compatible. To me anyway this put good use to all the empty space in front of my tower. Unfortunately after making some changes to the case, the backlight of the screen died.
i just upgraded my pc about 2months ago. and i also was thinking, well i do have alot of cd/dvd's even tho i have to look where they are, but do i want a dvd drive. thats thought lasted 5sec. of cos. the dvd market is not dead yet. and u get more grief in not having a drive when u need one than not using a cheapie one. plus i hope i can always buy my game boxes. u get twice the feeling of happiness for me. the first when u buy the game and hold it in ur hands and just admire the box and more often the fact that u finally have the game. and then the added joy of installing it the first time once home taking about 15min inputting the serial code just to make 100% sure u doing everything right for a good install. :-D downloading for me has never given me that. IMHO