Dell to Offer Blu-Ray Slot Loading Drive in XPS M2010

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Last week Dell announced that it would be offering a 500GB of storage on board their XPS M2010 and today the M2010 will also be the first portable PC to offer a 2x slot loading Blu-Ray optical drive.

The M2010 is a 20.1-inch widescreen portable PC with built-in high definition audio, so it's perfectly suited for the high def next generation media. Dell is a backer of the Blu-Ray technology so don't expect to see any HD-DVD support from the company any time soon. Toshiba and Microsoft are the major backers of the competing HD-DVD format. In terms of notebooks, Blu-Ray drives seem to be more available and winning the battle. Last year Dell first introduced Blu-Ray in the XPS M1710 17&quot; gaming notebook. Sony and Alienware also now both offer notebooks with Blu-Ray optical drives.

Dell XPS M2010 (view larger)

Dell mentions in their statement regarding this release the following benefits of Blu-Ray

• Picture quality of up to 1080p high definition resolution at 40 Mbps
• Up to 50GB of optical disc storage, five times the capacity of DVDs
• Drive has backwards compatibility with CD and DVD allowing DVD and BD movie playback, DVD and BD authoring and CD, DVD and BD data burning

 

oh goodie. A 20inch 20+pounder just got heavier lol.

too bad its still re-donk-elously expensive for what it is.
Also i think the blue ray will be just a reader and not a burner in this Dell.

Sony is still playing the i-own-it-so-i-do-what-i-want-with-it attitude. Last summer Sony made a point of being the first and only one to have a BluRay player/writer laptop. Panasonic and Samsung were able to offer BluRay in laptops for the asia market but they only had players.

 

Boo to dell for backing Sony. Any chance that HD DVD can storm back?

 

Toshiba is already putting HD DVD inside their laptops.But both of the technologies are receiving minor attention because of their price and the little of media available for them.

 

HP offers HD DVD too

 

How can blueray be winning? Only the sony AR and the dell xps series have them. While the HDDVD is being used in the toshiba qosmios, hp, asus w2pc series, fujitsu N6420 series etc. I can say that HDDVD is more common in notebooks than blueray

 

is this santa rosa 45nm ?

 

itll be intresting to see who wins this battle...im not getting any until unless i kno whats gonna be useful in te future it would be pathetic to buy something today and find out that its obsolete tomorrow because it has lost a format war
but wonder if the cd-r we find today is gonna be non existent after one of these formats become staple summat like the floppies i havent seen one in a loong time after flash memory raided the market

 

Nice that they upgraded to 500gigs. Helps the "Ain't it cool" factor a little more (not that the M2010 needs any help drawing attention to itself, but still)...

the real question is, do they ever plan on upgrading that graphics card... mobility X1900s are available now, why keep the X1800 around only to get stomped by their "lesser" XPS 1710...

 

BlueRay is winning because theres already over 200+ BR movies out and the 2 biggest respected dvd makers (Sony+Pioneer) have had players on the market for some time now(home use). Other makers like Samsung, Panasonic and Sony PS3 have given buyers lots of choices while HD-DVD is limited to mainly Toshiba. And Toshiba has already had a recall on some players that have problems and those who bought and kept them had to download firmware updates for them.
Out of the gates, HD-DVD certainly has had a rougher time getting themselves going thats forsures. But Toshiba is fighting back by selling a big portion of their HD line of players under cost to grab some of the market share they are losing.
LG is the only smart one that has a player that will play both formats in one unit

There are so many things that Sony has in their hip pockets that will prevent BluRay from being the BetaMax of the 70's.
One of the is their big brother SonyPictures. When Sony bought out Columbia/TriStar other film studios got really nervous. And now, theyre scarred outta their pants. Sonys aquirement into the film industry is now thought to be ingenious on their part cause now Sony can control the media thats played on their hardware.
When Spiderman3 gets released on DVD i bet it will be on bluRay first before it gets licensed for HD dvd.
Sonys holdings now are mind boggling. Two other independant film studios UA(UnitedArtists) and MGM (bought them last yr) are now owned by SonyPictures.

We all know that the bluray blank media(50g DualLayer) is slightly higher than HD dvd (30g DL). Well, TDK has now made a 100gig QUAD Layer blank. ANd guess who they made it for?? Thats right...only for Bluray!
And i just found out TDK is working on a 200g blank BluRay...thats insane!

So, as HD-DVD drags it feet BluRay just keeps leaping farther and farther ahead.

The only thing HD-DVD can do now is to offer the hardware at crazy low prices which is whats happening now.
But its the 'media' that will dictate how either system will succeed.

For now, it may not be a good idea to jump on any laptop that solely promotes HD-DVD player/writer

 

$25+ for a BluRay or HD-DVD movie? I'm not going to pay that. I just hope Sony doesn't get any bright ideas like Microsoft and try to force the market to adopt BluRay by phasing out regular DVD's like MS has done with Vista vs. XP.

Still though...options are good.

 

Lastly i want to make note that this kind of marketing of adding bluray or HD-DVD players to laptops is buyer beware.

The Dells M2010 resolution is 1680 x 1050. So it cant possibly produce the 1080p resolution of high def movies.
So all it is is just a player. No burner capabilities and no upgraded 1080p monitor means its just a useless add-on with no real benefits.

And of course this isnt the end of this type of marketing as more and more new laptops will offer high def players but without the output capabilities of 1080p buyers will just be buying and paying for the hype.

 

people can do weird things to get the "IN" thing
just another marketing technique
but you can always hook it up to and external display and watch the high quality content if needed rite?

 

well it doesnt have HDMI out and only DVI out so again its limited. I think it has component out but HDMI would be perferred.
When they decided to add the bluray they should have added HDMI out. I dont think Dell put a lot of thought into this when this puppy was made.
This is not to say high def vid cant be obtained with DVI cause it can. it'll just take 2 cords for audio and video instead on just 1 HDMI cable