Digital Home Thoughts: Dell Chooses Blu-ray Format for Notebook

"Dell Inc. added Blu-ray disc capability to its notebook PC line on Monday, making an effort to compete with Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. in the growing market for mobile high-definition video platforms. In addition to showing high-end movies and games, Dell's XPS M1710 notebook could serve as a central node to support digital entertainment throughout the home, the company said. Customers can save 50G bytes of either data or video on a single Blu-ray disc. The ability to read and write data to the discs differentiates Blu-ray from HD-DVD, the competing standard for high-definition video, analysts said. Laptops with HD-DVD capability have lower prices but cannot save data to the discs, said Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis Inc."

Colour me surprised - I thought that the laptops shipping with HD-DVD drives included the ability to write to HD-DVD discs. I'm not looking for new notebooks until after the Vista-equipped models ship (because it will mean a bump in baseline onboard GPUs), so I have to admit I wasn't paying much attention to this little detail. Blu-ray is the only game in down then if you need to have massive optical disc storage. In the grand scheme of things though, I have to admit I'm not sure how many people really need more than the 8.5 GB that dual-layer DVDs can offer right now. Will it be enough to sway Blu-ray's sagging fortunes? I somehow think not.