Baldie559

Any chance an HD player can read Blue Ray discs??

I purchased a toshiba laptop a few weeks ago with the HD DVD player because I got a great deal on it. Now i'm reading all over the net that the HD format is about to be obsolete with Blue Ray taking over. I feel like I just wasted my hard earned cash on this laptop because I won't be able to purchase HD movies anymore.

smz

Unless it was bought as a combo drive. You might as well cut our losses. Even a firmware upgrade won't help your cause. It's a losing battle. Gotta ante up for blueray new generation drive and lose some money from your HD-DVD's in the process. if you already jumped on the HD-DVD bandwagon and still have alot of movies in that format, you very well may consider a combo drive though I bet they come down to the same price as a blue ray only drive. The only think a HD-DVD drive is good for now is as an upconversion DVD player. You won't lose that option but for $60 something you can already by a drive that does that.

I would bury the HD-DVD and take a nice loss on it and kick yourself for buying into uncharted worlds in terms of High Def DVD formats. Blue Ray is the right choice.

Baldie559

Are there combo drives available now?? You are referring to a drive that plays HD DVD and Blue Ray correct?

dai

they are available but could not find one in the laptop form they do exist as sony has put one in a laptop
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/351712...l/Product.html

Baldie559

Well here is the laptop I purchased 3 weeks ago: Toshiba Satellite P205-S7476. Aside from the HD DVD/DVDRW drive (big + though), it also has the 17" screen, 3 gb of ram, 200gb HD, wifi a/g/n, harmon kardon speakers, webcam/mic, and fingerprint reader. I purchased for about $850 out the door at OfficeMax. Would you return it just because of the HD Drive?? At least it burns, which is useful.

I feel like I'm still getting my money's worth for that price and eventually Toshiba will have to selling option blue ray drives in the near future, even though they will be pricey, but at least there will be that option. What do you think?

smz

I have to tell you at $850 out the door, you are hardly taking a loss because you bought into a now "useless" HD DVD drive. But this doesn't affect the ability to play good old fashioned standard def dvdz. I looked up the model and Amazon has it on their site for $1150.

From a techie standpoint, there is one thing about that laptop that irks me and a few makers still do this. The hard drive in that laptop is 4200 RPM and in my experience, they are painfully slow compared to a 5400 RPM drive which is standard in nearly every laptop. The way of thinking in these higher end laptops is quantity and not quality.

The specs indicate 2GB of ram is stock. Did you have it upgraded? Also note this has onboard Video and can take a nice chunk of your system ram depending on how it's configured. The reviews on it frown on the Video performance and hard drive speed. The CPU is basically entry level from Intel on the Core 2's but still at the price you paid for a 17" form factor. You got a nice machine. Not sure if Officemax offers a return policy after 14 days and if they charge a restocking fee or not, but in that price range you won't find any new laptops with blueray dvd drives stock let alone a combo drive. I think you will see the combo drives start getting closed out as it doesn't make much sense to produce them when no more titles will be coming out in around 6 months. the amount of titles in HD-DVD format isn't enough to justify the production costs of combo drives. This still brings back memories of VHS vs Beta back in the 80's. VHS won and have you seen any VHS/Beta combo players? I don't know if they ever made such a thing back then but certainly you can see that many years later they would be useless.

Scott

Baldie559

I was one of the unfortunate ones that purchase a Toshiba laptop with the HD drive a month before the format war was decided. Do you know if Toshiba will eventually release a blue-ray add-on for their computers? Or will there eventually be a blue ray external player perhaps in the near future? If it wasn't for the other features on the laptop, I probably would have got rid of it and purchased another laptop.

luiscocneicao

there is already an external blu-ray player/writer on the market that doubles as a HD-DVD player. I can't remember who makes it but I do remember it is about 500$.

side note it also writes dual layer dvds. Steal of a deal if you could find one. sorry I cant help more

-also- Toshiba currently has a patent on a blu ray player out there but no news of how developed it is or whether it is stand alone or some sort of PC drive/external piece

smz

I know what he's asking and the answer is no. This is a hardware limitation where simply upgrading the firmware isn't going to make the machine all of a sudden play Blue Ray. They are entirely different formats. Thats why you had to buy a combo drive if you wanted both.

So it's not that Toshiba won't, but they can't offer and Eprom upgrade to make the drive recognize and play them. But at the same time, don't expect them to have a recall of every HD-DVD product for a free exchange for Blue Ray either. In the case of this 17" Toshiba. I wouldn't factor in the HD-DVD portion of the laptop as far as the price. For a True Core 2 Duo machine, $850 is a VERY good deal even if it had a regular DVD+_RW drive. Unless you bought this thing for the main purpose of High Def playback, returning it doesn't make sense. If you are expecting a lifelong supply of movies to be available in HD-DVD format, better try to return it or put it on eBay though the consumer is going to value it a lot less because of HD-DVD thinking that Toshiba marked up the MSRP because of it originally.

When the price comes down, you can always as what I think the above user was talking about which is an external Blue Ray drive or even when every laptop maker including Toshiba has blue ray drives in a laptop form factor. It could easily be just a simple swap. Most laptops only hold down the optical drive with a screw or two on the bottom of the laptop and it slides right out. Most drives are OEM and have universal screws that line up with manufacturer specific brackets and mounting kits. Some large and in HP's case, some with just a 1/2 snap on. But the faceplates are generally all interchangeable. I gather in 6 months they will start showing up on eBay.

HoofMouth

As to brewing leaves in that museum in Cairo, the number wasn't four, but three. I think you'll find that so if you turn back to The Scripts Museum Archives, page 66 article 2. Hope you and the little professor are just fine offendi.