Availability of Blu-ray Media
Posted by alan | Filed under Audio/Video, Editorials, Hardware, Photography
So, I’ve finally secured a Blu-ray drive for the OCMS labs. Now the only thing is to get hordes of BD-R media, so I ventured out on one of our famous OCMS Field Trips.
I go into one local computer store and ask where their Blu-ray media is. Looking bewlidered, the sales rep called over the store manager, who responded that it’s not not yet cost effective to have any in stock.
I stood there puzzled. I showed the manager the row of Blu-ray burners they had on the shelves.
“You see how these boxes are wrangling dust-bunnies?”
“Yeah”
“Don’t you think you would move more drives if people had discs to burn them with?”
“…”
He suggested that I go to Staples, which was down the street. I’m really not a fan of driving all over the place when I get a stick up my butt to buy new toys… I usually end up with buyers remorse and never take the thing back because it was such as hassle to get in the first place.
Staples actually DID have one Blu-Ray rewritable disc; but it was $25. For ONE disc.
The thing is, BD-R discs are already cheaper… you just have to buy them online. You can get a 10-pack of Blu-ray media online for about $50. That’s about $4-5 per disc, which is way cheaper than they used to be. Unfortunately, dual-layer discs (BD-DL) and rewritables (BD-RE) cost about $25 each.. which is totally not worth it. The BD-REs might be worth it for software backup… if you had 25GB of stuff that changed every so often.
At $4 each, I can easily convert all the HD-WMVs to Blu-Ray and free up a lot of space on my NAS. There’s really no reason to have a bunch of 8GB files sitting there when nobody uses them. It is cool to have the movies available instantly, but the space is more valuable.
Not to mention all of the software DVDs I can consolodate and archive to one disc. One $4 disc can get rid of about 6 single-layer DVDs. If you want to spend the extra cash on a 50GB disc, then you can eliminate 12 DVDs.
None of this means anything until BD-R discs are more available. The hardware is coming down… you can get Blu-ray players for about $200, and burners cost about $200. A regular BD-ROM (read only) drive can be had for about $100…
The time of Blu-Ray is at hand. I think that this year we’ll see the prices come down considerably.
Tags: LAN;, manager the row, sales rep, software backup, Staples, store manager, USD;
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2 Responses to “Availability of Blu-ray Media”
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Trisha Says:
April 5th, 2009 at 6:36 pmI hope the prices come down. I have a bunch of Blu-Ray movies to pirate. Just kidding.
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alan Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 8:58 pmTotally. There are a bunch of HD-WMVs that I’m going to convert over (*cough* Star Wars *cough*).
