I noticed at the local Best Buy this weekend that the first generation of Blu-ray DVD burners are on the shelves along with the blank Blu-ray discs. What are the legal (non-copyright infringing) uses the average home users can make of this new technology?
Well, for starters, they have about 50 gigabytes of storage space, don’t they? (I’ll go look it up in a minute). Which means my entire porn collection can now fit on ten discs! Also, are there any HD camcorders available yet? That would be another valid use for that much storage space.
Crap. I finally buy a Double-Layer DVD-R burner, and then this…
Well, as Washoe suggests, the average home user can use blank Blu-Ray discs for pretty much the same thing that s/he currently uses regular DVDs for. The main difference is that Blu-Ray discs hold a lot more information (although i think it’s 25Gb, not 50Gb as suggested above).
Of course, right now that comes at a (pretty steep) price.
The cheapest Blu-Ray burner currently available on newegg.com costs $569. The cheapest at Best Buy is $599. And the blank discs themselves are about $12-16.
These prices will, of course, drop over the next few years. But right now, i’m not running out to begin recording on Blu-Ray.
Did you find that price on their web site? 
Yes he did, except it’s an internal computer drive. I would have jumped on one at that price had it been one for the TV.
Buying a regular DVD burner now isn’t a bad investment at all. Most computers these days at least have DVD-ROM drives. Take your Blue-ray disc over to a friend’s house and odds are pretty damn good that he won’t have a drive to read it.
DVD+/-RW drives cost less than one-tenth the price of their Blue-ray counterparts, and the cost-per-byte of storage is far less, as well. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume a cost of $12.50 per 25GB disc. That’s 50 cents a gig.
A pack of high quality Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs will run you about 27 cents apiece for 4.37GB of space on each disc. That’s 6 cents a gig for something that pretty much any modern computer can read.
A few months ago, I had to find a floppy disk to make a BIOS flashing disk from for some retarded device. It took me three people and almost 20 minutes before we discovered that we were out.
I was searching my house for 700 MB CDR this weekend, and couldn’t manage to find one. I needed one to burn a boot disk for my mac (which doesn’t have a DVD burner). I have a whole 100 pack of DVD-Rs, but I can’t remember the last time I went to burn a CD.
I’m wondering how long it’ll be until I just want to make a simple BluRay movie to ship to my Mom, but all I can find are those damned holographic crystals.