Blu-ray burners and blanks in Europe in April says TDK

[Bob Crabtree]

In one relatively short pre-CeBIT press release, TDK looks to have told us more about the upcoming European launch of Blu-ray Disc burners and blank media than almost anything that's gone before.

According to the release - accessible here - disc-writing hardware and blank media should be on European store shelves next month. TDK doesn't reveal who'll be first with hardware but does say that it will be the first company to bring blanks to market and is already starting to ship single-layer 25GB write-once and rewritable Blu-ray Disc (BD) media across Europe - with dual-layer 50GB equivalents to follow in April.

The company has also given out recommended prices for all four types of its blank BD media. Cheapest of the bunch is the 25GB BD-R (write-once) blank, with an RRP of 15 Euro. Currently, that's equivalent to £10.29 and equates to 41p per Gigabyte.

More in this HEXUS.headline.

[Swafe]

Tenner for a disk?

[Bob Crabtree]

Tenner for a disk?

Blu-ray blanks are way more expensive that today's 4.7GB and 8.5GB DVDs - on a per-disk and per-gig basis (and we kind of expect that HD DVD will be cheaper than Blu-ray, too).

But whether people will be willing to pay what Blu-ray blanks cost will depend on whether they have a REAL purpose for a disc of this capacity and what they think that purpose is worth.

And, of course it's always VERY unwise to make many profound judgements about a technology based on the price of its hardware, software or blank media at launch time.

I say that as a bloke who (many moons ago) was perfectly happy to slag off the original Sony Walkman in print because of its very silly launch price but was - I'm glad to say - made to think again about the logic of doing so by an older and wiser colleague.

[JonSt]

Any word on HD DVD pricing yet?

[Swafe]

Blu-ray blanks are way more expensive that today's 4.7GB and 8.5GB DVDs - on a per-disk and per-gig basis (and we kind of expect that HD DVD will be cheaper than Blu-ray, too).

But whether people will be willing to pay what Blu-ray blanks cost will depend on whether they have a REAL purpose for a disc of this capacity and what they think that purpose is worth.

And, of course it's always VERY unwise to make many profound judgements about a technology based on the price of its hardware, software or blank media at launch time.

I say that as a bloke who (many moons ago) was perfectly happy to slag off the original Sony Walkman in print because of its very silly launch price but was - I'm glad to say - made to think again about the logic of doing so by an older and wiser colleague.

Obviously, but I remember when CDRs were a fiver a piece... of course itll take off, so will HDDVD in a differing amount but with a price point of a tenner a disk, apart from archiving honchos, I can't see them breaking into the mainstream until we see prices fall dramatically (Like CDs and DVDs have)

A dvdr now costs 10p, with 10th the capacity, thats a quid for the same amount of data, for the conveinience of having it on 1 disk, double that and then add a bit for blue shinyness, I cant see them hitting mainstream till disks are 2-3 quid or less for a 25gb disk, as I expect the drives will be a bomb too for the average home user when they hit the shelves.

[Bob Crabtree]

Any word on HD DVD pricing yet?

No, the HD DVD camp has been very quiet.

However, I'm kind of expecting that the HD DVD companies will use the CeBIT show (March 9-15) to kick-start things in Europe.

If so, we should be able to bring you info fairly rapidly, on account of our having a team of eight out in Hannover, six of them for the duration.

[vrykyl]

from the point of view of backing up my storage hard drives on something a bit more reliable, bluray or hddvd will be brilliant...having to burn 200gb+ onto dvdrw takes forever atm....if i could put in a much higher capacity disk and walk away for longer thatd be ace from my point of view... only cost is offputting atm...will depend on the cost of the burner

[Bob Crabtree]

from the point of view of backing up my storage hard drives on something a bit more reliable, bluray or hddvd will be brilliant...having to burn 200gb+ onto dvdrw takes forever atm....if i could put in a much higher capacity disk and walk away for longer thatd be ace from my point of view... only cost is offputting atm...will depend on the cost of the burner

Indeed, the back up possibilities are intriguing - including for digital-media, as well as system drives.

What does appear to be the case, though, is that burn speeds are relatively low.

If you check out the release, you'll see that burns speeds are quite low relative to, for instance, hard-disk write speeds.

A 2x burn is said to be 72Mbps - which initially seems impressive but is only 9MByte/sec. That's not in the same league as the write speeds of modern HDDs, whether Serial ATA or Parallel.

Doubtless, faster speeds will come, as the release suggests, but the initial write speeds are of some importance.

[Stoo]

I'll improve with time, after all, look at how much 2x cd burners were when they first came out.. now you can get a 52x for ~£10, the same thing happened with DVD Writers, and the same thing will happen withh Blu-Ray..

Give it a bit of time and the Burners will be <£50 and the discs comparable to DL DVD blanks now, then of course you'll get faster drives, higher capacities ad infinitum until the next next-gen optical storage medium comes along (which iirc are to be 1TB+ holographic discs..)

Same old same old

[TooNice]

I don't mind slow writting speed all that much though. As long as I don't have to swap media as often, its all good.

What I wonder though, is how much (good) media will cost.

Single layer Taiyo Yuden DVD-R/+R are about 35p each in big packs. Dual layer. I can't even be bothered looking whats good there since even the cheapest media carries a big premium.

[Stoo]

Dual layer. I can't even be bothered looking whats good there since even the cheapest media carries a big premium.

£15 for 10 Bulkpaq Branded 2.4 speed, which has come down a lot over the past few months.

Remember how expensive ZIP disks were when they first came out? and that was for only 100MB.. (or 250MB in the second version)

Economies of scale and all that

I suspect that by the time we get the christmas the blank Blue-Ray discs will be down to <£5 each, and a year on from the launch they'll be a similar price to Dual Layer DVD's now.