Palo Alto (CA) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced that it will use Blu-ray disc technology as successor for the DVD across "many" of its product lines such as consumer desktop and notebook PCs, personal workstations and digital entertainment centers.
The Blu-ray industry group scored a major win with HP's official announcement to integrate the technology into its product strategy and leave the competing standard HD-DVD aside for now. HP as well as Dell, the two largest PC manufacturers, already had announced public support for Blue-ray in at the Consumer Electronics Show in January earlier this year. A spokesperson for Dell also confirmed that the company had no interest in offering HD-DVD products in the foreseeable future.
According to HP, Blue-ray at this time is best positioned to replace current DVD technology and become the next standard for personal computing data storage and viewing high-definition movies. The company believes that the technology offers advantages over the HD-DVD in recording versatility, interactivity and capacity.
As HD-DVD, Blu-ray is based on blue lasers, which use shorter wavelength that the traditional red laser of DVDs and allow an increase of data density for data stored on 12-cm Blu-ray discs (BD) or HD-DVDs. Blu-ray discs are expected to become available in three different versions: The BD-ROM is a read-only format for software, games and movie distribution, the BD-R a write-once and the BD-RE a rewritable format for storing HDTV videos and data.
