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IFA 07 Acer has thrown its weight behind the Blue-ray Disc to become the fifth big-name computer maker to back the next-gen optical disc format. It's launched a BD-equipped media centre PC to affirm its intentions.


Acer's iDea 520: Blu-ray on board


Acer's plan to acquire Gateway will catapult the joint company into the top tier of PC manufacturers alongside HP and Dell. Dell has always supported Blu-ray, and while HP has been notably pro HD DVD of late, it was nonetheless an early supporter of BD.

To that list we can add Apple and Lenovo, both of whom have pledged themselves to the Blu-ray cause. As has Sony, of course - it's the only PC maker yet to equip its machines with BD drives to any great extent.


Acer's iDea 520: all mod cons

At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin today, Acer announced the Aspire iDea 520, a media centre system with a slot-load Blu-ray Disc drive. The machine is based on a 1.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 and packs in 2GB of DDR 2 memory, a 500GB hard drive, an AMD ATI 'M76M' graphics chip with 512MB of video memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and a digital/analogue TV tuner.

The iDea 520 is due to go on sale in Europe in October for €1999

spendy little computer but it's cute. Personally I favour blueray, but until both media and drives are affordable to me I won't be buying one (or HD).

linky to el reg

Tsk, Lis, it's Blu-ray. See the registrable trademark of dropping the "e"?

I had my brother the other week telling me how he was all set for entering the HD market in the near future as Blu-ray was the clear winner and then Paramount and some others switched over to support just HD-DVD rather than both formats.

Sometimes I think people just want to get raped financially.

"Early adopter" is a polite term for "sucker".

I can see blu ray making it in the computer industry, but since more movie studios are dropping blu ray for hd dvd, I see hd dvd winning in the movie segment.

Death from the Sea wrote:I can see blu ray making it in the computer industry, but since more movie studios are dropping blu ray for hd dvd, I see hd dvd winning in the movie segment.

Paramount and Dreamworks went in favor of Blu-ray because Microsoft offered them $100 million each. It's been reported several places and I know someone in one of those companies that confirmed it. They only did an 18 month contract, too.

Essentially, they were bribed in to it.

Read this:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/TechQ3 ... D_War.html

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Tsk, Lis, it's Blu-ray. See the registrable trademark of dropping the "e"?

They can call it the "Magical Fairy-Screwing Money Machine" if they want, it doesn't make it accurate. "Blu" is not a word.

Death from the Sea wrote:I can see blu ray making it in the computer industry, but since more movie studios are dropping blu ray for hd dvd, I see hd dvd winning in the movie segment.

Only Universal and Paramount/DreamWorks support HD-DVD exclusively, the rest either support both formats or are Blu-ray exclusive.

Here's how the formats rank against each other as of 19/8/07:

Week Ending 8/19
Blu-ray Disc: 71
HD-DVD: 29

Year to Date
Blu-ray Disc: 67
HD-DVD: 33

Since Inception
Blu-ray Disc: 61
HD-DVD: 39

Molyneux wrote:

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Tsk, Lis, it's Blu-ray. See the registrable trademark of dropping the "e"?

They can call it the "Magical Fairy-Screwing Money Machine" if they want, it doesn't make it accurate. "Blu" is not a word.

It's not supposed to be accurate. The format is officially called Blu-ray. Not Blue-ray.

Molyneux wrote:

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Tsk, Lis, it's Blu-ray. See the registrable trademark of dropping the "e"?

They can call it the "Magical Fairy-Screwing Money Machine" if they want, it doesn't make it accurate. "Blu" is not a word.

It isn't a word. It's a name.

Is "Microsoft" a word? How about "Swingline"? "Exxon"?

Howedar wrote:

Molyneux wrote:

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Tsk, Lis, it's Blu-ray. See the registrable trademark of dropping the "e"?

They can call it the "Magical Fairy-Screwing Money Machine" if they want, it doesn't make it accurate. "Blu" is not a word.

It isn't a word. It's a name.

Is "Microsoft" a word? How about "Swingline"? "Exxon"?

Yes, but a name has best avoid being a word, or else your trademark will probably be ignored. Remember how Microsoft tried to copyright "Windows" because it was a name? Yes it was a name, but it was also a word, and that was the problem. I think it's important to point out that it's a bad idea to use something that's both a name AND a word.

Yes, that's a very good point. It's not reasonable to refuse to call something by a proper name because the name isn't a word, though. That was the point I was trying to make.

Hence "Blu", which could only be construed as a non-patentable word and not a name by the illiterate.

I've just got back from the London Film and Comic-con and I noticed a load of stands there with HD-DVD but no Blu-ray ones. Either Sony is happy with their lead, or Microsoft and the other studios are really driving for a better grasp of the market.

I want to buy a new MBP, but Apple is being super-slow to make BD-ROM optical drives an option for them.

If a "name" enters far enough into common use, it becomes a non-trademarkable word.

Darth Servo wrote:If a "name" enters far enough into common use, it becomes a non-trademarkable word.

In the US. Most other countries don't do that.

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Hence "Blu", which could only be construed as a non-patentable word and not a name by the illiterate.

I've just got back from the London Film and Comic-con and I noticed a load of stands there with HD-DVD but no Blu-ray ones. Either Sony is happy with their lead, or Microsoft and the other studios are really driving for a better grasp of the market.

I've been told by a lot of people in the UK that HD-DVD is either winning or at least doing much better over there, because HD-DVD is more prominent in stores in the UK.

Praxis wrote: I've been told by a lot of people in the UK that HD-DVD is either winning or at least doing much better over there, because HD-DVD is more prominent in stores in the UK.

I have yet to see a Blu-Ray disc in any store.

Then again, there's hardly any HD-DVDs in shops here either.

Balls. I see loads of Blu-ray stuff in HMV and Virgin Megastores. HD formats just aren't that popular because everyone remembers Betamax vs. VHS and in that instance the better technology lost Sony a tech war.

I'm not getting burned like my aunt did. It'll be up scaling DVD players for now until a dual format player that's cheap arrives.

It's not just the legacy of Beta vs VHS. How many people even have a really nice TV, on which you'd really see the big difference that might make the expenditure worthwhile for people who are into their video?

The fact is that HD video has simply not reached the kind of "must have" status that DVD had, and for good reason. There is zero advantage of HD DVD over regular DVD other than the increased resolution. None whatsoever; it's not like the giant leap in user features between VHS and DVD. In fact, there are a few disadvantages to any major format upgrade which the new format must overcome by offering great new features. The HD movies you buy won't be playable by most of your friends if they borrow them. If you have many DVD players in your house (which is common), most of them won't play these new movies either, nor will your computers. If you have travel DVD players in your car or portable units for the cottage, forget those too.

Actually, it's funny you mention how the resolution is the only bonus, because according to the HD-DVD posters at the convention, one advantage is the ability to use interactive menus to go to chapters in the movie, or even see bonus material. Truly this is ground breaking stuff.

If it were still 1998.

I gave up after that and reverted to watching the Medieval II: Total War re-enactors in the background.

Darth Wong wrote:The fact is that HD video has simply not reached the kind of "must have" status that DVD had, and for good reason. There is zero advantage of HD DVD over regular DVD other than the increased resolution. None whatsoever; it's not like the giant leap in user features between VHS and DVD. In fact, there are a few disadvantages to any major format upgrade which the new format must overcome by offering great new features. The HD movies you buy won't be playable by most of your friends if they borrow them. If you have many DVD players in your house (which is common), most of them won't play these new movies either, nor will your computers. If you have travel DVD players in your car or portable units for the cottage, forget those too.

Pretty much. Honestly, the only time I ever noticed the difference between HDTV and regular TV was when my uncle was watching a baseball game and quickly flipped between the "regular" station and the HD station. Though I don't know if it would have been as "grainy" had it been on a normally-sized TV like the one at my house.

Other than that, even watching the HD channels on an HDTV, I don't really notice the difference.

The only thing I can say for Blu-Ray is that I heard it increases storage capactiy over regular DVDs. But I suppose HDDVD probably does the same?

It can depend a lot on the equipment and signal. Digital satellite, for instance, can look like ass when you get a lousy signal with MPEG artefacts you don't get with analogue, but which are less common. HD is a niche market now and the only reason we're even seeing anything in public is because of the two games consoles out for relatively little money that offers this technology to the consumer without the whole spending-a-grand-on-an-already-dead-fad issue. If you've got an Xbox 360 or PS3, why not have a go?

Twenty-five quid a pop for a movie I already have on DVD though? Think I'll wait a few years yet. Least the denser discs mean they've got great anti-scratch material coating on them as standard.

RogueIce wrote:The only thing I can say for Blu-Ray is that I heard it increases storage capactiy over regular DVDs. But I suppose HDDVD probably does the same?

It does, but not as much. A dual-layer DVD has 8.5 gigabytes capacity, dual-layer HD DVD has 30 gigabytes capacity, and dual-layer Blu-ray has 50 gigabytes capacity.

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Least the denser discs mean they've got great anti-scratch material coating on them as standard.

Jeez, no kidding. I read reports of PS3 buyers testing the durability of the coating by using steel wool on the free pack-in copies of Talladega Nights, and they still played fine.

Admiral Valdemar wrote:It can depend a lot on the equipment and signal. Digital satellite, for instance, can look like ass when you get a lousy signal with MPEG artefacts you don't get with analogue, but which are less common. HD is a niche market now and the only reason we're even seeing anything in public is because of the two games consoles out for relatively little money that offers this technology to the consumer without the whole spending-a-grand-on-an-already-dead-fad issue. If you've got an Xbox 360 or PS3, why not have a go?

Twenty-five quid a pop for a movie I already have on DVD though? Think I'll wait a few years yet. Least the denser discs mean they've got great anti-scratch material coating on them as standard.

My girlfriend and I are currently care-taking this Samsung HDTV-LED-DLP-whatsit that belongs my brother-in-law while he and my sister are temporarily living in in his parents' home until they can move to a bigger place. The difference between standard resolution and HDTV channels is astonishing. Compared to the HD broadcast, when I flip over to the standard resolution channel, it actually looks blurry. It doesn't help that the standard resolution broadcast image is not only enlarged, but also stretched to fit the 16:9 ratio screen, as compared to the 4:3 (unless you set it to 4:3 mode, which results in the edges of the screen not being used and quite frankly, at that point it looks better on the old standard res TV we have). It's $5 a month more to rent the HD box from Comcast, and I'm quickly getting spoiled watching HD baseball and the additional HD channels. My girlfriend calls the Discovery HD channel we get "The Scenery Channel."



Even if we were going to have this glorious monstrosity long-term, we're not about to upgrade our DVD collection anytime soon. We have about 200 movies on DVD and Darth Wong makes a good point, none of the DVD players on the laptop, tower machine and the 2 other stand-alone players we own will play any new HD DVDs we would buy for a new player, so until the price of these new players comes way down, it's going to be a long time before we upgrade equipment.

I've already done some gaming with my laptop hooked up, but it can't run anything like Quake 4 or Doom 3, so until I hook up my gaming box, I've been playing around with Thief 2 in the interim. Even though it's from 2000, it still looks pretty damn good on the big screen.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:[Jeez, no kidding. I read reports of PS3 buyers testing the durability of the coating by using steel wool on the free pack-in copies of Talladega Nights, and they still played fine.

TDK has been playing around with coatings for years - some of their DVD media had it. It's especially critical for Blu-Ray discs since the data layer is closer to the surface and thus more susceptible to damage.