Blu-ray Pioneer and the Future of DVD Hardware

A couple of news bits (or is it bytes?) about the good folks at Pioneer:

According to Techradar, it seems like they've come up with a monster storage solution - a 400GB Blu-ray disc.

Yowza - that's serious storage on a disc!

According to the company, "Since the optical specifications of the objective lens…are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs."

One question: how long does it take to burn and finalize the thing? A month? Methinks this is for industrial use only. Don't hold your data while you wait to pick up this "behemoth" at your local electronics store.

Also, Digitimes reports that Pioneer has "landed OEM orders for Blu-ray Disc (BD) Combo drives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) with shipments to begin in July 2008, according to industry sources in Taiwan."

With these combo drives priced around $110-120, it now seems very likely that the cross dissolve from DVD-R to BD-R is finally under way.

Thank goodness. Now to start thinking about all those HD home movies I gotta burn...

I also heard from another source (not Pioneer - actually it was a retailer), that the plan is to discontinue DVD set-top players as quickly as possible (actually, he said by Christmas 2009, but that seems pretty aggressive) so that Blu-ray hardware is what's left on the shelves.

Mind you, DVDs will not go away, but the Blu-ray format will be what DVDs will be played on - at least until folks catch the drift that they now have a Blu-ray player and they say, "hey, wouldn't it be neat to see a hi-def disc on this widescreen TV we already have?"

Hey, if the price is right, more power to the Blu!