Just for you John:
Panasonic Develops 4x Blu-Ray Burner
It is not out today but by the end of September -- that's soon enough.
And while I will admit that a 750gb drive is relatively inexpensive to purchase right now my response was in comparing a 25gb disc when within 30 days you will be able to buy a drive that will burn a 50GB disc at 4x. That's shortsheeting the facts.
No, it isn't. It's what I can buy today; not weeks from now assuming it actually ships on time.
It still won't keep up with external disc; and you haven't solved the cost equation either.
The burner is going to be more expensive than a 750GB drive; and the media is going to cost you the equivalent of 2-3 more 760GB drives.
Let me put it to you this way:
For a smaller out of pocket expense I can put up 2.25 TB of usable and protected storage.
As for backup speed, as you can see this drive is stated to acheive 4x speed. There are some companies claiming 10x speed on BD backup. As you know, speed goes up as time goes by. Another shortsheeting of the facts.
Yes, and they do for hard drives too. Since both will increase in speed over time how is this shortsheeting the facts; other than it's not me praising Blu-ray as the savior of the world.
Anyone that needs archival backup won't use blu-ray.
As for price, all prices go down after time -- except for land -- my understanding is that they aren't making anymore of that stuff unless you count moving it into the sea. I expect prices to be high intially and then come down to reasonability within 2 to 3 years.
In 2-3 years; the drive capacity will be measured in multiple terabytes. How will you keep up with the dramatic storage capability increase?
For perspective; it will take ten non-existent 200GB discs at an unknown cost and an unknown availability date for a hard drive I will be able to buy next year.
Neither side is standing still.
This whole HD-DVD vs BD thing is about distorted facts.
Some of us provide facts; others don't.
What one can and the other can't.
Until sometime in 2008 (unknown yet) the feature set of Blu-ray will lag behind HD-DVD. Until the 2.0 spec players ship HD-DVD still has a greater scope of features.
This will be > 2 years after launch before Blu-ray can catch up to where HD-DVD was at on day one. And you talk about HD-DVD getting a product out before it's ready?
How cheap one is compared to how expensive the other is. How one has features the other can't do. There is only one thing BD has that HD-DVD doesn't -- that's 25gb per layer compared to 15gb for HD-DVD. And there is nothing HD-DVD has that BD can not do.
Get back to me in 2008 when you can upgrade your player's firmware across the internet; share with your friends and download new content for Blu-ray. You can't as these are 2.0 spec and nobody meets that spec.
While you're at it; show me PiP on Blu-ray. Oh wait that isn't shipping yet either. So 18 months + before we get that on Blu-ray.
It remains to be seen whether HD-DVD will deliver on the 51GB disc they mentioned at CES. I remain somewhat skeptical of its arrival.
Given time (my guess is 6 months to a year) there will be no differance between the two formats except for who is supporting whom.
Nothing that iHD can do will not be able to be done under Java-Live and vice-versa.
No one has argued this point. What has been pointed out to you time and time again is that the cost to deliver the interactivity on Blu-ray will remain higher. Apparently you don't consider the studio's costs for production to be important and it most certainly is.
The only real differance is what codec is being used and the bit rate.
Since they're identical the choice to use which codec is an authoring decision; not format based.
Can you really see a difference between MPEG-4/AVC/H.264 between a 12-13 Mb/second VC-1 vs. an 18 Mb/second VC-1? What about for H.264?
If the answer is no; then it's wasted bits.
BD will always be able to use any compression codec the studio wants to use (they already do) and the bit rate can and should always be higher.
Is the picture really better? I haven't seen conclusive evidence that this is the case. I've seen some cases where one codec has flaws and the other has different flaws. Pick your poison there.
PQ and Audio Quality will be relatively the same and the cost will be too. At that point the consumer will either vote (by their wallets) one format out or both will go on to live for a few years and never replace DVD. That is pretty much the whole can of beans -- as they say.
That's fine by me.
