Slide Show: 10 Ways to Go Blu-ray
So Blu-ray Disc won the high-definition DVD format war, leaving Toshiba's HD DVD in the dust. Now what? Solution providers who have been hesitant to recommend high-def products until a clear winner emerged now have their champion. We take a look at hot business and consumer Blu-ray products that are ready right now (or soon will be).
Hewlett-Packard's Compaq 8710w Mobile Workstation is geared toward business users that need high-end performance without being tied to their desks. It is available with a 17-inch display, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz processors and 2GBytes of memory. Packed with top-notch graphics capabilities and certified for design and media applications from ISVs such as Adobe, Autodesk and Avid, the 8710w also supports high-definition content with an HDMI connector and an optional Blu-ray DVD+/RW SuperMulti DL drive. Blu-ray equipped models start at $2,999.
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Hitachi appeals to the Quentin Tarantino in all of us with its DZ-BD70A Blu-ray Camcorder, which can record approximately one hour of high-def video on an 8cm single-sided Blu-ray disc. Offering sharp images and rich color, it features a widescreen 2.7-inch LCD view finder, 10x optical zoom and 500x2 digital zoom. It is priced at $1,299.
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Panasonic Consumer Electronics in May plans to begin shipping its SC-BT100 "home theater in a box," which supports high-definition 1080p Blu-ray video. The system includes wireless rear speakers and can be upgraded to optional full 7.1 channel sound with the purchase of two side speakers and a transceiver. It also sports an integrated docking station for an Apple iPod that charges the device and plays music or video from the iPod through the home theater system. Pricing has not yet been released.
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Sony, the main supporter of Blu-ray, has no shortage of hardware to bolster the cause. Among the cooler products is its HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Sever. At the heart of the unit are a full HD 1080p 200-disc Blu-ray Disc/DVD/CD changer and a 500Gbyte hard drive. By Sony's math, the storage capacity comes out to 137 hours of high-def video, 40,000 songs or 20,000 digital photos. In other words, customers can flip through a boat-load of content without leaving the comfort of their La-Z-Boys. And it also burns content onto Blu-ray Discs or DVDs. It is priced at $3,499.99.
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Maybe you've got customers that already built a gigantic HD DVD collection. Or maybe they want to snap up movies on the cheap in all of the HD DVD fire sales. Why force a choice when consumers can have both? LG Electronics offers the Switzerland of high-def players, the Super Blu Player Model BH200, which supports Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. It also improves the playback quality of standard DVDs and plays audio CDs to boot. It sells at retail for about $800.
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Dell's high-performance Precision M6300 Workstation was built for desktop replacement, offering 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo and Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition processors and up to 4GBytes of dual-channel memory, plus an NVIDIA graphics card with up to 512Mbytes of graphics memory, up to a 200 GByte hard drive and a 17-inch display. Dell is selling models with Blu-ray optical drives starting at $2,370. One potential downside to going Blu-ray on the M6300 is that it requires Microsoft Windows Vista. Customers would have to say bye, bye to Windows XP.
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Sony at the end of 2006 included Blu-ray playback capabilities on its PlayStation 3 gaming console. The move helped pre-populate the high-def market with its technology and is widely credited as one of the major strategic moves in Blu-ray's eventual format war victory. Sony is selling a 40GByte system for $399.99, including a copy of Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray Disc. Is your Spidey Sense tingling yet?
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For customers with the urge to create, the best place to start is a blank canvas. Or in this case, a blank Blu-ray Disc. Panasonic obliges with its LM-BR50DE 50GByte storage media discs, perfect for recording high-def content. They are priced at $39.99.
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Sony says its Vaio RM HD Video Editing System is built for videophiles, and we believe it. The system is built for users that want to create high-def video content. That includes the software required to capture, edit and burn video in the Blu-ray format. The system includes an Intel Core 2 duo processor 2Gbytes RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics and a Terabyte of HDD storage. It's priced at $3,500.
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Sony's BDU-X10S is an internal BD-ROM drive that can turn a PC into a high-def Blu-ray Disc player. It comes with CyberLink's PowerDVD BD Edition playback software and includes a Serial ATA interface, with support for Windows Vista or Windows XP. It's priced under $200.
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