RSSSamsung Blu-ray PC drives coming in Q4
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published June 18, 2008, 4:18 PM
Samsung officials told reporters it will ship a Blu-ray write-capable PC drive in the first half of next year, preceded by a combo drive in the fourth quarter of this year.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- At an invitees-only press event here this morning, representatives from Samsung told BetaNews they're looking to catch up with Hitachi in the Blu-ray PC drive market.
Samsung had been partnered with Toshiba in the production of HD DVD drives. Meanwhile, Hitachi and LG have been partnering in Blu-ray drives, with some very good success recently. With Blu-ray the surviving entity, it's now time for Samsung to follow the trend.
The company's combo drive will combine read-only Blu-ray functionality with read/write capabilities for DVDs and CDs, said Richard Aguilera, Samsung's national sales manager for optical storage. His colleague, John Suh, told reporters the write-capable Blu-ray drive will allow read/write functionality across all three media types.
During the presentation, Aguilera acknowledged that Blu-ray constitutes only a small percentage of the optical disk drive market today. People still listen to CDs in their car on their way to work, he added. However, Samsung expects the high-definition side of the market to pick up in 2009 and '10, as activity in the HDTV market continues to skyrocket.
And they will cost more than the PC itself.
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|Yea, really...!
Base PC: $499.99
With BR-Burner Option: $1799.99
Lets also remember that MS does not (Currently) develop a Driver for BLU-RAY, so it's all on the Manufacturer to make it work.
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|Since Vista, Microsoft absolves itself of all rsponsibility for drivers, so that is nothing new.
That has been one of the largest failures of the Vista experiment.
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|Correct!
Vista is nothing more than "Windows ME 2.0"
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|heh.. everytime Sony chants hurray its followed by and Awwww then its back to the drawing board again to find something else to spark Bloray
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|It would be nice to see high definition audio in cars. DVD-Audio was the greatest audio format ever created. It's too bad car manufacturers didn't put it in mainstream cars (and not just the high end luxury cars).
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|I couldn't agree more. I almost got an Alpine with DVD-Audio capability... but since I only have a few discs, I couldn't justify the price difference (Metallica's "Black Album" never sounded so powerful).
Though there were surround mixes on the discs, DVD-Audio only offered high-resolution (24-bit, 192 kHz) audio in 2-channel mode. Perhaps Blu-ray Profile 3.0 will carry on the high-definition audio legacy, and pick up where DVD-Audio left off.
Fight niche with niche, I say! :)
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|Yeah that would be nice.. HD-Audio FTW =)
But this news is kind of silly, its basically announcing that sometime, perhaps before June 2009 you can purchase a Samsung BD-R unit for your PC..
Perhaps there should be a list of companies that already sells above mentioned tech.. where you don't have to wait up to 1 year for your purchase ;P
In other more interessting news as of yesturday Panasonic has launched the first 6x BD-R single and dual layer discs.
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