News Sony will release Blu-Ray PC in March

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/01/20/sony_blu_ray_pc_march/

 

thats got "bad investment" written all over it!

 

Yay, more DRM crap for us loyal consumers. /me hugs my DVD collection.

 

Indeed.

 

£10 a pop, thats more expensive then hard disk space

£100 will buy you 10 blu ray disks, and £100 will buy you a single 250GB hard disk and an ice box to carry it around in. I know which I'd go for.

Of course, this is good overall, 25GB and 50GB are something I'm seriously looking forward to, if they don't take ages to get them out there easily available and fairly cheap, optical storage might actually be usefull to me for a while.

 

It may just be me, but I had huge problems with recording CDs when CD-R/RW burners were first released - failed writes and so on. At £10 a disc, you wont want it to fail...

 

Do you think the PC will ship with Sony's infamous rootkit installed as standard?

 

Well I'd never pay £1800 for a PC so I could get Blu-Ray early, especialy as it may not take off and HD-DVD wins the next gen optical storage battle.

Hell I'ain't even gonna spend £250 on a stand alone Blu-Ray burner when they come out, I'll wait till they're £30 like I did with DVD-RW and CD-RW. By that time the world will probably have decided which one they want to use.

Until that time, DVDs will do the job fine for me. Just look, games are only just coming out on DVDs because publishers have realised anyone who can play new games has at least a DVD-ROM. With HD-DVD and Blu-Ray it's not gonna be that simple.

 

Well assuming hardware goes by the $1US=1GBP standard it tends to adhere to...
25GB SL BD = $2.50/GB
300GB/16MB 7200RPM ~ 40c/GB
100pk DVD-R ~ 4c/GB

Yep, I'll keep my current setup. Thanks to $27 for a 100-pack of blanks, $13 for a hundred DVD cases , and free rentals, my DVD collection finds itself expanding quicker than it should (and for about 50c a movie with a quality cover printout, you can just imagine). HD still doesn't impress me at all, but I watch on a computer monitor which can upscale the image fairly well (actually, my Xvids look ten times better than actual DVDs, but that's because I have a cheap player and haven't found a reasonably priced way to hook it up to VGA yet).

Not to menion I wouldn't go near Sony with an auto-shotgun, let alone the standard ten-foot stick. Well maybe the auto, but definately not the stick.

Just slightly OT - is there ANY difference between "high definition" and "high resolution", or is that just playing to consumerism? I'm fairly certain that both are 24-bit color depth (8/8/8) but I could be wrong.

I'll take that ~$2k and go buy myself... umm... ~4.5TiB worth of hard drives. Though hooking up sixteen drives could pose a slight problem.

 

£($)10 / 25GB = £($)0.40/GB by my reckoning.

 

OMG sony is freakin evil,ok, ok, ok, dvd recorders some years ago were like 500€ and dvds were 5€ each and dvds were recorded at blisterings speeds of 1X and 2X and there was a 25% chance it would not burn correctly.
but now materials are cheaper and i cant see why BR are so pricey, oooooooh sony is realy realy REALY evil and i would only go near sony with a BFG, a auto-shotgun wont do.

And yes i bet it will be DRM'ed and rootkit'ed to hell and beyond.LOL

 

£1800 for a high end PC is reasonable, as long as the specifications are competetive.

 

When they do launch drives commercially it'll be the cost of the drive + an entirely new graphics card with HDCP support + an entirely new monitor with HDCP support. I went to DVD in '99 because it was cheap to do so, but the studio execs must be smoking their crack pipe if they think I am going fork over £1k plus just to watch Blu-Ray movies.

 

It's the way everything works, a company works out how much it can sell it for to make a nice profit, and aims to make that price after a few years. It starts off really expensive then slowly drops as more people buy them because companies need to recoup the losses from all the R&D (research and developement). So the first sales, people are paying for the materials to make them, the labour to make them, part of the R&D cost, profit to sony, profit to all the middlemen (shops, distributors, etc.)

When the R&D costs are finally paid off you then just get the £30 models, where you pay materials, labour and profit.

Just look in a maplins catalogue, blue and white LEDs are pretty new technology that took alot of R&D to get working, so a blue/white LED will set you back 10x more than a standard red/green/etc. LED because they need to get back the money they lost researching it. Although with LEDs its a matter of a few pence, not a few hundred £.

 

Man, I watched Sony drive MD/Hi-MD into the ground by trying to tell consumers what to want instead of giving consumers what they actually wanted, and now it looks like they're set to do the same to Blu-Ray. Of course, I don't have an emotional attachment to Blu-Ray, so go for it, Sony!

Nezuji

 

Hah, duh. But still, it's write-once versus a faster rewritable that doesn't need any special software. I just pray that one of the new formats is treated as a removable drive when you insert blank -R media - it'll definately win the hearts of anyone who's ever backed anything up beyond a floppy. That's what I did like about floppies...you didn't need special software ever (and XP has crap CD burning support, and NO DVD burning support).

But, alas, that probably won't happen.

Yes, Sony was downright retarded with minidisc. Horrible software and a general poor execution, but the concept was great. Awesome battery life, anyways.