The long wait is over. Blu-Ray, the savior of high definition media has finally
made its way into the personal computer. Many feel it is long overdue; it is
highly unusual for the computing industry to be left waiting on the stands to
play catch up with innovation.
Currently, Blu-Ray discs are being developed for BD-Rom or read only, recordable
and rewritable drives for HP, LG and Dell. It is only a matter of time before
the rest of the industry players will integrate the hardware into their own
line of PCs.
LG Electronics for example, has started to market a line of Blu-Ray Disc writer
drives at a cost of $900 each. It can support recording at 4x speed as well
as high speed read only memory. The company has also come out with a dual core
Pentium PC with 320 GB hard disk which costs roughly $3,500. Pretty steep, but
then considering the package you get in return, it is pretty tempting.
Sony has also launched the Vaio laptop line with a built in Blu-Ray Player.
At $3,600 each, some may consider it too expensive for the laptop's 17in
LCD screen. Besides, with it just being a Blu-Ray Player, it is missing out
on all the bells and whistles that usually give the Blu-Ray value for your money.
Panasonic has also jumped in the Blu-Ray bandwagon and currently has an aftermarket
line of add-in Blu-Ray disc drives. This just means it is an add
on upgrade for your current PC. It is about the same size as current
disc drives, and will easily fit into most standard drive bays.
A minimum of Pentium 3 would suffice as data back up usually does
not tax the capacity of the average computer.
Playback of Blu-Ray movies, is a different story altogether. The high bandwith
video streaming required by all High Definition movies would need the full capacity
of a high end personal computer.
If you don't want all the hassle of buying another computer, you can install
your own Blu-Ray Disc drive into your own computer, it's really not that
hard. After selling your soul and your first born son to scrape together the
dough needed to buy a Blu-Ray disc drive, it is all downhill from there. Consider
first your need for a Blu-Ray disc drive, if it's for storage purposes,
get one that supports writing and recordable capabilities. With 50GB of space
on each Blu-Ray disc, you'll never be at loss for memory. Imagine having
one Blu-Ray disc exclusively for all your music downloads. That's a whole
year of groovy listening pleasure at your hands without ever having to listen
to the same song twice.
If you just want to watch hi definition movies on your PC., then a simple read
only Blu-Ray Disc drive would do the job. Just remember to upgrade
your video card in order to maximize your full High Definition viewing
experience. Otherwise, why bother to get a Blu-Ray if your hardware
isn't compatible? You would just as yet get the same results
with a run of the mill DVD.
