With the format war over, we haven’t seen a great plethora of new Blu-Ray integrated products now that sitting on the fence isn’t an option. Neither have we seen the usual great price hikes associated with a monopolistic market. In fact Dell are now offering a laptop with a Blu-Ray drive (not burner) for under US$1000.

Their Inspiron 1525 laptop range start as low as US$879 with a Blu-Ray Disc Combo option, tack on another $200 for the Blu-Ray burner. Here are the specs on the $879 Blu-Ray player, err, laptop

* Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83 GHz
* Vista Home Basic
* 15.4 inch 1280 x 800 res display
* Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
* 1 GB DDR2
* 80 GB SATA hard disc drive
* Dell Wireless 802.11g card
* 28 Whr battery

And of course your Blu-Ray combo drive. The laptop has an HDMI output so you can hook it up to your HD home system and supports 720p.

So $879 for a laptop/Blu-Ray player, not bad, eh? Obviously the specs are nothing special, but if you’re looking for a basic laptop and a HD player then this could be a great option. Hopefully this also heralds price reductions with other Blu-Ray integrated hardware.

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Addonics have released their latest addition to the sit on the fence brigade when it comes to HD formats. Their new external player, the Zebra, sports the ability to play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs on your PC, an ideal Christmas present for the undecided! Unfortunately it won’t write to discs of either format but fear not, the usual read/write capabilities for CD and DVD are available with a 16x write speed for DVD-R available.

The unit itself looks pretty sturdy with two models available, ZBH63DES and ZBH63DEU, the latter sporting USB 2.0 connectivity whilst both models can hook up to your PC via eSATA. Here are a few more details for ya

* Max read speeds BD-ROM - 6x (215.79 Mbps), HD DVD-ROM - 3x (109.65 Mbps), DVD-ROM - 16x (22.16 MBps), CD-ROM - 40x
* Writes to DVD-R SL & DL, DVD+R SL & DL, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW
* Plays nicely with Windows 98SE thru to Vista, Linux Kernel 2.6, Solaris 10 upwards and Mac OS X 10.4.x
* Has a fan based cooling system for when you’re overloading it with HD data
* Aluminum body giving a total weight of 3.92 lbs (1.87 kg)
* 258 x 168 x 60 mm

These puppies are already available from Addonics at US$409 and US$429 (for the USB 2.0 option) which seems like a good price for a dual format player. However those of us who would like to write as well as read will have to wait for a suitable player.

Source: Addonics

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Panasonic must be very proud of their latest Blu-Ray player, the DMP-BD30K, as it’s the first BR player to be introduced with the Final Standard Profile. The FSP adds new functionality to Blu-Ray players such as Picture in Picture and Audio Mixing (alternative sound source). Other bells and whistles include

* Support for the AVCHD video format
* SD card slot
* HDMI 1.3 1080p output with 24fps
* Component, S-Video, Video outputs
* 5.1 channel audio output

And it’ll play just about any disc format you care to throw at it apart from well let’s just say ‘the other one’. If you have other Panny gadgets wired up to this sucker you can make use of their EZ-Sync functionality to control them all with one remote.

The DMP-BD30K has already been reviewed over at CNET and gets a commendable 7.4 out of 10. I must agree that with a price tag of $500 plus the features Panasonic have crammed into it, the DMP-BD30K would not be a bad purchase. However how can the BR camp compete with the incredibly aggressive pricing of the opposition?

Source: PR News Wire

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Another day, another Blu-Ray drive and today it’s the Optiarc BC-5500A a slimline Blu-Ray drive for your laptop. Unlike yesterday’s Blu-Ray drive, the Sony BWU-200S, this sucker will only read your discs but obviously being able to watch your fav Blu-Ray movies whilst you are out on the road with your laptop could be handy. Optiarc is a joint-venture between Sony and NEC and this is its first Blu-Ray drive for laptops and with a price tag of around US$335 they are hoping it will enable laptop manufacturers to make Blu-Ray drives available in ‘mid-range’ units.

Just in case you were wondering it can burn to single-layer DVD±R/RW at 8x (dual at 4x) and to CD-R/RW at up to 16x.

Source: Reg Hardware

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