It looks like the death of HD-DVD is already starting to pay off, with BluRay drive makers ramping up production and prices dropping rapidly.
A search of PC parts price search engine Staticice.com.au shows a Lite-on BD-ROM drive can be purchased for as little as $203 -- a huge improvement on the $1500 prices for the very first BluRay drives that came onto the market. (UPDATE: A Pioneer BluRay combo drive is available for even less - $199.)
This Lite-On can read BluRay at 4X speeds, write to DVD at 12X and CDs at 32X. Interestingly, the much higher density BluRay disks have a slower seek speed than the more basic CD and DVD formats. It takes the drive 350ms to hone in on the right part of a BluRay disk, while it takes just over half that time for a CD or DVD.
The specifications note that you'll need a pretty grunty PC setup to be able to play BluRay movies: "Pentium D 3.0GHz or faster CPU and 1GB or higher RAM are required, HDCP capable graphics card with 256MB RAM, PCI Express x16, 1920x1200 resolution, 32bit color, GPU: nVdia GeForce 7600 GT / 7800GTX512 / 7900GX2 / 7900GTX / 7950GX2 and ATI X1600 / X1800 / X1900 series are recommended."
Note particularly the HDCP requirement -- that relates to the copy protection on BluRay discs which require every component in the display process to be capable of decrypting the copy protection, right through to your monitor. So you need an HDCP-compliant video card and an HDCP-compliant monitor or TV.
Not all BluRay discs implement the HDCP protection, so early adopters without HDCP may get lucky, but it's certainly not a sure thing (especially as there is no competition in the high definition marketplace any more, so it's likely that the movie studios will start locking down their content with HDCP very soon.)
The price drops look set to continue, with Sony today announcing a $299 (recommended retail price) BluRay ROM drive (BDU-X10S) which comes with CyberLink PowerDVD BD Edition software for playback of commercial movie titles. Given the RRP of $299, expect to see that drive on the market soon for considerably less.
The other good news is that optical drive makers finally seem to be making the switch to SATA for good with BluRay drives. A quick search on Staticice turned up no PATA BluRay drives, but plenty of SATA ones. Given every computer made in the last three or four years has had SATA ports on the motherboard, this seems like a perfectly reasonable time to cut ties with PATA (not to mention that you'll need a pretty recent-model computer to be able to make use of a BD-ROM anyway.)
The news is less appealing for BluRay burners -- they still cost $500. Though that's certainly no longer an unaffordable price point, it's still not the kind of 'impulse spend' price that will see people picking one up on their way home from work to bung in to the PC before dinner.
Link: http://www.apcmag.com/8370/bluray_drives_hit_200
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