HP to Introduce Blu-ray Disc Drives in PCs Next Year

HP today announced that they will start selling PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives in late 2005, starting in its desktop PCs, media center PCs, personal workstations, and digital entertainment centers. "Our decision to back Blu-ray was largely because of its capacity advantage (over HD-DVD), as well as the interactive features being built into the specification." said Maureen Weber, general manager of optical storage at HP. Pushing products based on Blu-ray to market is a priority for HP.

"The arrival of high-definition content in the home, along with the convergence of PCs and home entertainment, has created a need for a higher capacity optical disc format." said John Romano, senior vice president, Global Consumer PC Business, HP. The drives are expected to be backward compatible with CD/DVD, and to support read-only, recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs. HP also plans to introduce Blu-ray Disc drives in notebooks in early 2006.