Blu-ray for less green. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Sony has introduced its third generation Blu-ray drive that can be added to PCs to create Blu-ray discs...or play movies. And the price of the new BWU-300S....has dropped to under four hundred dollars. Sony's Bob DeMoulin acknowledges...
"That's still relatively expensive for a consumer, but that's actually the price point where we saw DVD burners start to do their big sales uptick was at 399. So we're actually kind of optimistic that maybe we've found a sweet spot for Blu-ray disc burners."
And as far as the uses for the drive are concerned...
"You can use this drive to record a Blu-ray disc, so you can store up to 50 gigabytes on a single disc, whether it be data, video, what have you. You can take video from your high definition camcorder and drop it onto a Blu-ray disc that will play back in your standard Blu-ray disc player. It's a DVD burner, it's a CD burner, it's also a Blu-ray disc player. It's a very good Blu-ray disc player. If you want to add burning capability but probably right now you're actually wanting to just watch movies more than anything else...it's a great drive for that."
Keep in mind...Blu-ray playback requires considerable computer horsepower and graphics capability....so adding the drive to an older PC isn't likely to be very satisfactory. If your system is up to snuff...Sony is including the movie Men in Black on Blu-ray to get you started. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.