Miscellaneous laptop discussions forum: Why Blu Ray?

storage device. It'll hold much more data than DVDs, and, as such, will hold true HD movies. Do you want to watch an HD movie on a laptop screen? Not me. That said, there are BR burners, and the software to do this. And they can store a very large amount of data, up to 25 GB of data. That's a lot of backup storage.

For the definitive answers to your questions, go here http://www.blu-ray.com/info/

As far as I'm concerned, a BR drive does not belong on a laptop.

One option for Blu-ray. If the laptop has an HDMI output, and if you have an HD TV with HDMI input, you could use the laptop as a Blu-ray player. This would be the only reason I'd buy a laptop with a BD player. But then again, I couldn't tell you the last time I rented any movie.

Before you even think of using Blu-ray to store or archive data, take a look at the price of the media: about $20 per disc for 25GB, and $40 per disc for 50MB. Might be worth waiting a few years until the price comes down.

The number of times I burned coasters using CDs and DVDs scares the heck out of me going to Blu-ray - imagine burning a $40 coaster!

Here is the link I mentioned in my earlier post, I forgot to add it oops.

http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en&q=external%20blu%20ray%20drive&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wf

I agree, on a good high def TV the picture quality is outstanding. I can remember about 12 months ago in my local HMV store, they had a little bit on the stands next to the DVD's where they had a small number of Blu Ray and HD DVD disks. Now 12 months later in the same store they have a stand the full length of the back wall of the building solely for Blu Ray films.

Yes, the only real use for a Blu-Ray player on a laptop is to play Blu-Ray movies. Unless you've got a large screen on that laptop, HD video is overkill.

Most software is on CD-ROM disks, a handful are on DVD-ROM, none are on Blu-Ray now and very few titles are forseen anytime soon.

Now a Blu-Ray recorder stores a lot of data on each Blu-Ray disk, and that might be nice for backing up everything or working with very large video files. However, it would definitely drive the price well above your $1,000 limit, and the media is very expensive. A DVD recorder would be much more affordable and should store full backups on just a few inexpensive disks. A CD recorder is the bargain basement choice.

I can remember a time when DVD recorders were costly, and a time before that when CD recorders were also expensive. So perhaps in a few years Blu Ray recorders will be cheap and common - about the time something new and expensive comes along!