Now you can fulfill all your HD porn needs in one drive
Hitachi and LG Set to Unveil Blu-Ray/HD DVD Drive for PC – TechAmok.com: Hitachi-LG plans to demonstrate its GGW-H10N ‘Super Multi Blue’ drive at CeBIT 2007 show in mid-March. It does not mean, however, that the company plans to start selling it right away: the expected arrival timeframe is May, according to CDRinfo and the projected price is roughly $1200, which means that the PC drive alone costs the same amount of money as the BH100 player compatible with both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. The Hitachi-LG GGW-H10N drive can read, record and re-write CDs and DVDs (10x speed for DVD1R, 8x for DVD1RW, 6x/8x for DVD1R DL) as well as playback, read and record single- and dual-layer Blu-ray discs (4x or 3.5x speed), it also can playback HD DVDs. The device is designed for Serial ATA interface. The GGW-H10N can record up to 50GB of data. Surpassing the market standard, LG is providing a 4x recording speed of Blu-ray Discs, which means that it takes only 23-24 minutes to burn a full single layer BD-R disc (25GB), compared with 46-47 minutes for conventional 2x recording.
US$1,200, holy crap!
The biggest technical problem was figuring out how to fit all the logos on the front of the drive.
Hell, I don’t even have a HDTV yet. Meh!
The device was also on display at CES:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=9246
It is not even a cost effective backup device (HD DVD only drives are cheaper). Screw the Blu-ray/HD DVD aspect. If consumers don’t support either of these competing formats, maybe these two groups will be forced to get their act together and come out with a common standard. Consumers should not have to pay for what essentially is a marketing experiment.
RE: “The biggest technical problem was figuring out how to fit all the logos on the front of the drive. ” — posted by Chuck
Chuck, thanks for the chuckle…that was funny!!!
Holy crap what? That $1200 isn’t for everyone, nor is the device.
The real question is if this device will support all of the features of both formats, as opposed to the gimped HD-DVD support in LG’s combo player.
#6, it should support all HD-DVD and Blu-ray features, since those are provided by software. Of course, if you’re going to watch HD content from those two types of media, you will need Windows Vista and a video card that has HDCP connected to a monitor with HDCP, in other words, HD ready. If you have a monitor with analog only inputs you can count yourself out, the software players will not play the content. I don’t know if there are any workarounds.
The 8800 video card from NVidia has HDCP, and any of the newest Dell widescreen monitors will also work. Of course, you will still need a very powerful machine to run all this.
#7,
One small quibble. It will require those features if the HD-DVD or BluRay title in question requests those features. Currently no titles require that level of DRM. Even then if the title did request those features, the disk will still play, although it will play it at standard DVD fidelity.
These drives are starting to look like something from NASCAR.
#2
Join the club… 😉
#7, #8 – It’s a safe bet that by the time any disc does require those features that a hack will already be out to get around the issue.
Personally, I’m looking for these drives to get down ($299) for the holiday season… which I believe will coincide with the first real BluRay/HD-DVD marketing push.
Now I just hope someone will make a Mac driver for one of these things. 😉
2, 10 – Me neither. Crap in HD is still crap.
11 – If that happens, and Netflix can feed the drive good movies in HD, I might change my mind about it. Assuming I can also afford and actually want the HD TV to go with it, and feed it through a painless wireless connection from the PC, similar to what Apple announced. Still sounds like a lot of hassle though. There’s a tipping point somewhere and this tech hasn’t come close yet.
tru dat TJG.. I’d rather have good upsampleing than DRM
and keep my lagacy equipment alive
there’s just not that much good content out there..
i’m the consumer.. i will pay for what i want.. give me a fucking chance
#12 – You hit the nail on the head: None of this stuff gets us past the tipping point on HDTV. While in theory you can capture the content of a BluRay/HD-DVD disc, put it on your network, and stream it wirelessly to a television, no one has put it all together… not even the high end guys.
Personally, I’m working towards centralized storage of my content with wireless streaming… but I’m not going to force the issue by throwing money at half-assed solutions.
James Hill,
Forget that, I am not at all interested int he HD drives until they get in the 30-50 dollar range. I continue to find myself underwhelmed by HD, for all the additional cost.
Maybe if there was greatly increased color fidelity, but I don’t think even the plasma sets compare to the fidelity of seeing a movie on film in a movie theater.
Over christmas, CompUSA had a demo set up playing superman on plain old dvd and some hd format. Sure the resolution was there, but it didn’t look like the hd format added any color depth.
The only time the format ever impressed me, was on some crazy 80″ set I saw somewhere. But that tv was like $10k. Even as expensive as movie theaters have become, I can buy a lot of movie theater pop corn for $10k. For as much as I watch sports, I can go to a lot of real life base ball games for that kind of money and watching the game on some 80″ TV is still not as good as being in the base ball stadium.