Tech Tok

It’s plain to see that HD and Blu-ray are neck-and-neck, with Blu-ray changing price the most dramatically.
It may be that Blu-ray will take the price/GB lead from hard drives by summer.

Just a quick followup note from a thread I did on Twitter yesterday on the prices of a Gigabyte of storage on various media.

DVD’s are still the king at just over 3¢ per gig:

Kind	¢/Gig	xDVD
Blu-ray DL	25.0¢	7.8x
CD	20.5¢	6½x
DVD DL	11.0¢	3½x
Blu-ray	10.4¢	3¼x
Hard disk	8.9¢	2.8x
DVD±R	3.2¢	1x

I find the dual-layer DVD vs hard drive equivalence fascinating, especially after talking with Iain yesterday about
the eSATA ports on my Mac Pro’s motherboard.

Sources for prices are Canada Computers
and Fortune Computers.

Update: per my comment below, DVD-DL updated from 17¢/GB (5x) to 11¢/GB (3½x).

Update: per another comment, Blu-ray updated from 51¢/GB (16x) to 20¢/GB (6½x).

Update: another comment: Blu-ray updated from 20¢/GB (16x) to 12¢/GB (3¾x).

Update 2009-09-09: another comment: Blu-ray updated from 12¢/GB (16x) to 10.¢/GB (3¼x), added Blu-ray DL. Also updated hard disk from 17¢/GB to 8.9¢/GB as per current prices of 1.5 TB drives.

Helios X5000

Note, this is not about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. :-)

I’ve been pretty happy with our two LG players (an LD-530 in the bedroom and an LD-531 in the living room), but one feature has been lacking and it’s getting more and more critical over time.
More and more of my downloaded TV shows are in resolutions higher than NTSC. The LD-530/531 (and the follow-up LD-731 apparently) can’t handle any resolution better than 720×480.

Most of my shows are now in “HR” format, which is exactly one-half the dimensions of 1080, i.e. 960×540. Some are in HD720p and some are now coming in as HD1080i (in raw .ts form, no less; let’s hear it for over-the-air recording!).

So I think I’ve found a new player: It’s the “Helios X5000 HD Network Media Player”.
Not only does it play up to HD1080p resolution DivX and WMV (and MPEG and .ts I think) with HDMI output, but it has an ethernet jack and wireless 802.11g through which you can play HD content on your network.
The highest bitrate you can play wirelessly is 12 MBps, because.. that’s as fast as wireless can go.

Helios X5000 (rear)

It’s has a good review from
enGadget
and people are
saying good things on the AVS forum.

It’s a bit pricey, but it has a lower-cost sibling, the 3000, which I haven’t looked into yet.
It also has a pricier sibling, the 8000.
I’ve spent too much time on this already so feel free to mention the pros and cons of the two siblings in the comments!