Digital Home Thoughts: Pioneer to Sell Blu-ray Drive in Early '06

"Pioneer Electronics announced its first Blu-ray Disc drive Tuesday, the BDR-101A, which will store as much as 25GB of data when it goes on sale in the first quarter of 2006. The drive isn't expected to be for everyone, Pioneer said. One particular market the company does hope to reach is so-called content creation professionals, who need to make sure BD-ROM movies work properly before they're mass-produced for mainstream consumers. Blu-ray drives, backed by an alliance led by Sony, are set to compete with HD-DVD drives that are expected to arrive at roughly the same time. Both drive types employ a blue laser that can read and write smaller areas of information, letting more data be squeezed onto a single disk. That's important as high-definition video arrives."

This is so awesome to hear, I honestly want to be first in line to get one of these. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are competing and there is no clear winner yet. The Sony PS3 (coming in the Spring) is going to be equipped a Blu-ray drive while there rumour of a new XBox 360 HD-DVD version at around the same time frame. So I will likely be making some investments then, however having an extra 25GB of removable backup media in one of my servers sounds just about perfect. Plus, setting up a PVR that can do HDTV also sounds cool.