HD For Indies

Hey all - I'm back, and what better way to dig into this than to share that Pioneer is expected to show Blu Ray optical disc drives for personal computers at CES.

This report is an amalgamation of reports from other sources listed at the bottom.

-on sale in Japan (pending two licensing issues)
-BDR-101A works without a cartridge or shell, single layer BD-R and BD-RW discs
-single and dual layer BD-ROM
-can write DVD-R and DVD-RW discs as well (but what about CD-R and CD-RW?)
-Japanese manufacturers only, end of January for now
-US first quarter (so probably not in Macs announced at MWSF in a few weeks, even though Pioneer has often been a vendor for Apple's bleeding edge optical technology)
-so likely 2nd quarter 2006 for inclusion of US based systems - so much for Steve Jobs' "later this year" quote at last MWSF 2005
-ATAPI interface, "33M bytes per second" transfer rate - that is almost certainly read speed, I'm very interested in write speed, which is likely lower (usually is with optical drives)
-no price quoted
-no stated plans at this time for direct to consumer sales
-this is the first shipping date for a BD-R drive
-DRM stuff (AACS) is holding up both HD DVD and Blu ray.

Mike's Comments: Welllllll.....so much for Steve Jobs' "later this year" comment last January at MWSF about being able to burn high def DVDs. At least Apple has had plenty of time to practice in the meantime. Japanese manufacturer's only for now, and not until end of January, and only if licensing stuff gets ironed out. So unless Jobs wants to really overpromise/underdeliver January 9th in San Francisco, no BD-R drives in Macs to ship at MWSF, or even "within 30 days" as the old euphemism goes about products that ship in 45-90 days in reality. Unless he pulls a rabbit out of a hat with some Apple only deal. Which has happened before. But the licensing stuff is out of his hands - it is up to industry consortia that he can't strongarm. But the good news is that right out of the gate Pioneer is going for a burner, not just a player. I see no support for CD burning mentioned (and they would, wouldn't they, if they had it?) nor mention of reading CDs (which I could potentially see them failing to mention as too minor a point).

Somebody with more time on their hands than I have - go back and check the specs for inclusion of reading CD/CD-R/CD-RW media, please. This whole thing has dragged on so long I've forgotten the specs.

Otherwise, we're back to dual optical drive days - a MegaDrive (Blu Ray and DVD) and a plain old CD burner IF CD burning isn't supported.

But this is all good news - sounds likely we'll have Blu Ray (MegaDrive, anyone?) burners in Macs by this summer.

Sources:

Macworld: News: Pioneer to launch Blu-ray Disc drive in January

Pioneer Prepares to Launch Blu-ray Disc Drive (from Yahoo! News)