Blu-ray Drives Not Popular On PCs

[admin]

Research group iSuppli says that Blu-ray drives are failing badly on PCs, predicting that even by 2013, only 16% of PCs will have Blu-ray drives installed.

Reasons for such poor penetration of Blu-ray drives could be that people are simply happy with their DVD writer drives, and happy with the storage capacity of your average DVD, and those requiring high capacity can simply look towards USB drives and external HDDs. Another reason could be because the main benefits of Blu-ray movies, the high resolution video and audio, are not as evident on small PC monitors, many of which are not 1080p capable (and let's not even get into most people's cheap PC speaker sets). And as a format that's predominantly movie based, much like the early days of DVD when hardly anything (other than movies) were published on the DVD format, there's really not much use for it on the PC, not until Blu-ray writer and media become more accessible.

But even so, you cannot beat the value and convenience of a USB flash drive. USB flash drives are rewritable, do not require special hardware to read or write, are not prone to scratching or damage and can fit in your pocket. These are all things that Blu-ray rewritable discs can never achieve. And looking at the price, a 32 GB drive at $60. A 25 GB BD-RE (rewritable) currently costs $11. Which seems to favour Blu-ray, but if you add in the cost of the hardware (cheapest is $110), you'll have to burn quite a few Blu-ray discs to justify the spending. And then for people to read the discs, they have to have a Blu-ray drive too, which rules out all netbooks, most notebooks and most PCs - making the discs rather useless.

More:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137103/Blu_ray_tanks_in_PCs

[drfsupercenter]

I got a Blu-Ray drive in my laptop... mainly because it has almost 1080p resolution (it's 1680x1050) and I want to be able to have some form of a portable Blu-Ray player.

The drive is BD-read plus a full DVD+/-RW drive, so really, it's nothing lost... besides a couple hundred bucks.

[UncasMS]

The drive is BD-read plus a full DVD+/-RW drive, so really, it's nothing lost... besides a couple hundred bucks.

a couple of hundred bucks for READ only is what i call a severe loss

watching a movie on a pc/notebook may be fine, but it has nothing to do with what a good bd has to offer

so not being able to also burn bds - i wouldnt want one

i spent ~$200 for a LG BD writer and i consider the price tag ok especially when comparing it to ~$350 or more i spent on my very first HP SCSI CD burner

[admin]

I think prices for Blu-ray drives are pretty reasonable these days. Most of the readers are also multi format DVD writers, and so you're really only paying maybe an extra $30 to $50 for the Blu-ray reading capabilitites. Blu-ray writer prices have come down a lot too.

But the problem is the media, which is still expensive, and also neither here or there. It's too big (in GB terms) for casual storage of a few files here and there, and too small for storing complete backups. I just don't think other than HD A/V recording, Blu-ray recordables, especially rewritables, have a place in the market. Single write discs might have a place for archival storage (for things you don't want to accidentally delete), but 25 or 50 GB is a lot to lose if the disc becomes unreadable in the future.

I think for archival and backup purposes, redundant external hard-drive arrays are the future (or maybe the present already) - more reliable, TBs of space, and networkable (local and remote access). They are not as portable as optical discs, but for the type of data they store (and by offering remote access), they don't need to be. For portable data, USB flash drives already dominate. For data distribution, online based pure digital transmissions are quickly gaining ground, as more and more people buy games, music and movies digitally. So this leaves physical A/V distribution (DVDs, Blu-ray movies) as the optical disc's main purpose. Is this the beginning of the end for optical storage?