Blu-Ray Drive for Every High-End PC

It will take years for the consumer electronics industry to fully adopt Blu-ray disc (BD) technology that enables movies in 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution, but personal computer industry is highly likely to embrace the standard much faster.

End-users have been adopting larger displays with higher resolutions throughout the history of PCs and next year there will be loads of 23”, 24” or 26” displays featuring 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 resolution. Even though PCs are usually used for work or video-games, many do watch movies on their computers. But DVD movies look extremely bad on large full-HD screens and many users either consider downloading movies in 1280x720 (720p) resolution, or buy a Blu-ray disc drive and start to collect BD movies.

At present Blu-ray drives start at $100, which is just a fraction of the cost of a high-end personal computer, and next year such drives will be even more affordable. As a result, higher-end gaming systems will start to sport them by default sometimes in 2009 just to declare another “feature” to drive sales amid economic turmoil.

We do not expect all owners of BD-enabled PCs to rapidly stop buying DVDs and get Blu-ray movies instead (just because of the fact that Blu-ray discs still cost considerably more than DVDs), but with drive inside their high-end PCs, they will definitely start using the technology and see all the advantages it will bring.