Blu-ray: Background Article, Laptops & Notebook PC's with High Definition Video

It’s October 2007 and by launching Lifebook N6460, Fujitsu finally joins the Blu-Ray bandwagon driven by Sony and acknowledged by many other mainstream notebook manufacturers. With Blu-Ray discs outselling HD DVD, their only rival in high definition video format, with a leading ratio of 2:1 in the first three quarters of 2007, it’s no surprise that Dell, Acer, ThinkPad, ASUSTek, Alienware etc all bring forward elite notebook models that support Blu-Ray drives.

In an attempt to make Blu-ray technology more popular with the masses, Sony has recently given a face-lift to its line of VAIO notebooks. In addition to the VAIO AR Series, the series where Blu-ray drive first ever appeared in any notebook PC, Sony has also equipped VAIO FZ20 series with high definition Blu-ray drives. The VAIO FZ series consist of 15.4” notebook PC’s, are less pricey than the AR’s and more portable at a weight starting 2.8kg.

It all started back in August 2006 when Blu-ray disc drives were first integrated into notebook PC’s and hence a milestone was achieved in notebook technology. Sony was the first to ship a notebook PC that boasted of high definition Blu-ray drive. The pioneer model from the VAIO AR series, powered by NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD Technology, came equipped with Sonic’s Roxio software to burn up to an unprecedented 25GB on a single layer disk.

Apart from the gigantic size of data, Blu-ray technology also allows for exceptional picture and video quality at an astounding resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.

The coming out of Blu-ray disc drives, in the second half of 2006, also called upon software developers to design solutions that would enable consumers to make use of the high definition features. InterVideo and Ulead were among the first of the developers that worked on to fulfill this demand. InterVideo’s WinDVD offered navigational and playback solution for Blu-ray disc formats and Ulead’s DVD Movie Factory with Blu-ray support allowed easy post-production processing of high definition content.

It wasn’t until December’ 06 that dual layer Blu-ray discs, with the capacity to hold up to 50GB of high definition content, were sent out in the market by Sony. The same month also saw Dell embracing the Blu-ray technology and equipping its first notebook model with a Blu-ray drive, namely XPS M1710, the superior gaming and home entertainment platform.

Acer played it safe by announcing the availability of notebook models with not only Blu-ray drive but also the other of the cutting edge high definition formats, which is HD DVD drive. Acer incorporated Blu-ray in Aspire 9810, while offering HD-DVD format on TravelMate 8210 notebook.

The competition between two similar technologies, Blu-ray and HD DVD that fight for the status of next generation DVD standard has been termed as “War of Formats”. While this war continues, it’s not only the companies behind these technologies, namely Sony for Blu-ray and Toshiba for HD DVD, that stand mystified, but notebook users at large who can’t decide which high definition technology to go with when upgrading from older laptops.

It’s this war of formats that has lead to creation of products like Broadcom’s System-on-a-Chip solution that allows for support of Blu-ray as well as HD-DVD format. Apart from this first-of-its-kind hybrid solution for high definition content, Broadcom has also designed a solution specifically for Blu-ray that addresses the need of mainstream notebook manufacturers to offer high definition video playback capability in their systems without too much of hike in prices. The solution, available as add-in card format, makes use of Broadcom’s Media PC technology. The technology calls for lower CPU utilization, lower power consumption, while still rendering ideal high definition content.

As of now, many notebook manufacturers have integrated Blu-ray drives on their selected models. The more popular of these, and not mentioned above, are ThinkPad R61, Alienware m9750, Acer TravelMate 8215WLMi, HP Compaq 8710p, ASUS Lamborghini VX2 & W2W, as well as a few models from Dell Inspiron series. To be more precise, the Inspiron models are 1420, 1520 and 1720.