I was browsing at my local Best Buy this evening, and lo and behold, what did I find? One Sony BWU-100A Blu-Ray Internal 8x burner! And for the low low price of $749. Actually, while I say that in jest, I find it to be not a terrible price considering: A) The Samsung BDP-1000 player in the next section over costs $1000 and can only play Blu-Ray discs, and B) That as a computer storage device capable of 50GB backups, that price compares quite favorably with tape drives that can cost thousands of dollars. I was very tempted to pick one up, but I remember picking up my first DVD burner for $349. A year later they cost $80, so I feel like I should learn my lesson. Still, it was tempting, and also very nice to see on the shelf.

Wanna watch some BD movies on the go on a 1920 x 1200 screen? How about a nice Sony laptop with a BD player built in? You can even connect it to your home theater with the laptop’s HDMI output. The VAIO AR20 series has a 17″ screen, Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor at 2GHz, and 2GB of RAM.

Somehow, I get this inkling little feeling in the back of my mind, that this laptop will be expensive. Hmm, I guess I don’t have to be a fortune-teller to predict that!

Sony launches HD laptop with Blu-ray

Will Pioneer release the Holy Grail of next generation optical formats? According to our friends at both HDBeat and Engadget, Pioneer has stated at a conference in Berlin that they are working on the BDR-103 combo drive. Very few details are available, but even if this thing were to retail at $1000 and assuming you can play prerecorded movies with it, the drive will be a bargain for HTPC users everwhere. Slap this baby in an HTPC with one of those new HDMI video cards and you just might have the most incredible HD rig of all time. You would conceivably be able to back up all of your HDTV recordings without reencoding them, not to mention store all of your photos or other media files on a lot less discs. Hopefully more info will be out there soon!

Engadget Link

HDBeat Link

UPDATE: It seems as if this oh-so-tantalizing rumor was just that. HDBeat has updated their blog to say that Pioneer is NOT working on a hybrid HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Drive. Oh the humanity of it all.

Plextor has announced a BD (Blu-ray Disc) drive for the PC. It’s the model PX-B900A and it’ll be available in October. It’ll have an MSRP of $999.99 and come bundled with a BD-RE disc, Ulead VideoStudio 10, and InterVideo WinDVD BD. (Hm, wasn’t InterVideo just bought by Corel? I only remember that because Corel is a former employer.)

Supposedly distributors, retailers, and consumers have been “clamoring” for a Plextor brand Blu-ray drive. It does more than just BD, however. “The PX-B900A drive delivers fast recording speeds of 2X BD-R/RE (9 MBytes/sec transfer rate) on single layer and double-layer media. For DVD, the driver delivers 8X DVDR on single-layer media, 4X DVD+/-R on Double-Layer and Dual-Layer (DL) media, and 5X DVD-RAM. The drive also supports 8X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, 6X max DVD-ROM, 24X CD-R, 16X CD-RW, and 32X CD-ROM. The PX-B900A drive features an 8MB data buffer.”

Plextor Announces Blu-ray Disc Drive for North American Market

Sometimes I think it would be really nice if I lived in a world where all the HD programming I want could be grabbed over the air (OTA). Unfortunately, I live in an area, in a country actually, where OTA HDTV is not all that common.

Why? Well then solutions like home-made PVR’s would become available to me as an option. And I could use OTA tuner cards like this one from ATI:

The TV Wonder 650 is based on the Theater 650 chip, including a “motion-adaptive 3D comb filter” as well as noise reduction, and touts the ability to work in Vista systems, even though it’s still questionable whether the rest of your system will. Aside from recording over the air HDTV signals in MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV9, the card also sports “Avivo image quality enhancements” for those less stunning SD broadcasts. ATI gives you the ability to record / watch two shows simultaneously via the MulTView functionality (if you own two cards, of course), and touts the nifty ThruView technology that displays content in a translucent box as to keep from interfering with all your (presumably) important background tasks.

I’m sure a lot of people in big cities will be taking a look at this solution. Too bad I don’t have this opportunity.

ATI releases TV Wonder 650 OTA HDTV tuner card

Is there a hole in your computer waiting for an HD disc burner? You got some money to spend? Maybe Hitachi-LG fill that computer hole and put a hole in your wallet at the same time, with their new 4X speed BD burner. The model GBW-H10N only burns BD-R discs at 4X speed, so BD-RE’s are still going at a pokey 2X pace.

The burner is due to ship this month for an undisclosed price. My guess is about $1000, like most other BD burners.

Hitachi-LG Readies World’s First 4X Blu-ray Burner

Sony has made their BWU-100A BD burner available for pre-order. This burner for your computer is available in August for the price of $750, which is about $250 cheaper than competing burners.

This burner can read and write single-layer DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD+RAM discs, dual-layer DVD+R, and CD’s in addition to its BD writing capabilities. It can write BD-R’s and BD-RE’s at 2x speed.

Sony unveils BWU-100A Blu-ray burner