Hewlett-Packard is stepping up their support of Blu-ray from financial to full on production. HP announced on Tuesday that their media center PC’s, desktop, and personal workstations will include Blu-ray disc drives by late 2005, followed by notebooks in 2006. HP is set to launch with three different formats; BD-ROM, a read-only format; BD-RE, a rewritable format for HDTV recording and data storage and BD-R, the write-once format for HDTV recording and data storage. The Blu-ray drives will have two read heads so it can be backward compatible to read and also write the consumers existing CDs and DVDs. The drives will also offer the company’s LightScribe technology, which allows professional quality text and graphics to be burned directly onto LightScribe-enabled Blu-ray discs using the same laser that burns to the data side of the disc.

HP is one of the first companies, in the long list of Blu-ray supporters, to announce their full commitment to Sony’s next gen DVD format. Even though this is PC support it is a huge step forward for the Blu-ray side. Of course, we still wait for the movie studios to decide before this format war is fully over. We may not be waiting much longer, hopefully.

R.Hollis

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2004 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Blu-Ray News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.