Items tagged with BD

It's coming, Star Wars fans. The question is: are you ready? For the first time ever, the Star Wars saga in its entirety will be available on Blu-ray, the highest resolution home film format yet. It's an announcement that fans have been waiting for, but the painful part is waiting from now until this time next year. That's right, this amazing... Read more...
Right from the start, Sony has been one of Blu-ray's largest fans, and also one of the company's pouring the most money into marketing the format. Many people assumed that Blu-ray was a format created by Sony at first, but it's actually not. Nevertheless, Sony is now helping to advance Blu-ray into the next level, teaming with Tohoku University... Read more...
Thanks to the invention of the netbook and the tablet PC, it's safe to say that not everyone's main mobile machine has an optical drive. And in a lot of cases, that's perfectly fine. Not everyone needs an optical drive, and the added space, cost and power usage is sometimes not even favored. But that's why there are external optical drives,... Read more...
It's true: Blu-ray is outgrowing itself, but thankfully, there's room for expansion on the current format. There have been rumors for years that larger optical discs were on the horizon, and even hints that Blu-ray itself may grow. But now it's official, and those who always assumed that a single 50GB dual-layer disc would one day be too small... Read more...
When it comes to storage and media, "big enough" never really is. With the amount of 1TB and 2TB hard drives on the market today, it's easy to see that the demand for massive amounts of storage isn't fading soon, and even on the optical media side, there's an unyielding desire to cram more and more data onto the discs... Read more...
Blu-ray adoption still has aways to go before it matches the ubiquity of DVD, but those who can't get enough storage are already looking beyond the first generation. We've already seen TDK working hard on a 320GB optical disc based around BD technology, and now there's a new report suggesting something entirely more... Read more...
Plextor announced a new Blu-ray internal writer, the PX-B940SA. This new drive features Blu-ray write speeds of up to 12x, which Plextor claims is the fastest available on the market today. The drive comes with CyberLink’s BD Suite software package and uses a Serial ATA interface. In addition to Blu-ray, the drive also supports DVD R/RW and... Read more...
Looks like we've got ourselves quite the conundrum. Today, Pioneer has unleashed the planet's first-ever 12x Blu-ray Disc writer. Problem is, all writable Blu-ray media available on U.S. shelves is still at 6x. In other words, you can now buy a writer that'll toast media twice as fast as the media that's currently available. Like we said,... Read more...
At the CEDIA Expo, Pioneer announced that its Elite BDP-09FDr Blu-ray Disc Player has become the world’s first to achieve THX certification. The company’s Elite EX Series in-wall speakers have also attained THX Select2 certification. Both of these products complement the company’s Elite A/V Receivers, which are also THX Ultra2 Plus Certified... Read more...
Toshiba told us it was coming, and now the world can finally mark it down: the company famous for supporting HD DVD while everyone else sided with Blu-ray has finally decided to product its very own BD deck. Some might view this as the real death of HD DVD, as for the longest time, Toshiba would have nothing to do with the rival format that... Read more...
We already knew as much, but today Toshiba has made it extra official: it's joining the Blu-ray camp. For those unaware (yes, all six of you), Toshiba was far and away HD DVD's largest supporter during the format's boom years. After a long, hard-fought battle with Blu-ray that spanned nearly 24 months, HD DVD finally... Read more...
Finally, a solution for that perplexing issue that hits netbook owners the hardest. Asus has placed its recent design cues onto a new external optical drive, but this is no normal external optical drive. Instead of just reading back DVDs and CDs, the SBC-04D1S-U External Slim BD-Combo Drive plays back Blu-ray Discs, promising high-def playback... Read more...
While HDTV growth is still strong during the global recession, Blu-ray adoption remains sluggish. We obviously can't pinpoint the exact reasons, but we have our guesses. The primary reason we figure the format still hasn't taken off the way BD backers would like is price. Even years after BD hit the mainstream, the price of admission is still... Read more...
The world hardly needs another Blu-ray player that only a few in a hundred can afford, but that's exactly what we're getting with Harman Kardon's latest. Granted, this one's aimed directly at the high-end market, so we'll certainly cut it some slack there. The BDP-10 is a Blu-ray / DVD player that can also play back multimedia via USB, and... Read more...
Just a few weeks back, Lite-On introduced its very own 8X Blu-ray Disc reader; today, Pioneer is one-upping that with its 8X Blu-ray Disc burner. The BDR-2203 picks up where the others have left off by adding in 8X BD writing (the fastest currently available for the format) as well as the traditional CD-R and DVD-R burning capabilities. Aimed... Read more...
BD-Live (AKA Blu-ray Disc Profile 2.0) titles were released earlier this year, despite the fact that there were no players yet capable of supporting BD-Live.  But ...Hi again everyone. Here’s a quick preview of the next PLAYSTATION 3 system software update coming up in the next few days. Firmware v2.20, introduces a number of features... Read more...
Our friends at the Tech Report have a review on-line today detailing Abit's P965-based AB9 Pro and their 975X Express-based AW9D-MAX Core 2 compatible motherboards. As usual, the crew at TR does a bang-up job covering all of the finer points of each product. "Abit has beenon the comeback... Read more...
Abit's BD7II-RAID Vs. MSI's 845E Max2 BLR Two Fully Featured i845Es Do Battle... By, Marco Chiappetta August 6, 2002      With the release of their "new" Pentium 4s, Intel revised their mainstream i845 chipset to add official support for 533MHz front side bus frequencies.  This new revision of the i845, was... Read more...
  Dueling i845 DDR Boards From Abit and Asus Abit's BD7-RAID and Asus' P4B266 Take Flight By, Dave Altavilla January 23, 2002   We're back again with a look at two new motherboards based on Intel's recently released i845D chipset with DDR SDRAM support.  Our initial look at the i845D was centered around some fairly standard... Read more...