Budget Blu-ray Laptops Now Available

It was a good strategy for the computer manufacturers to sit it out until the format war was over. They didn’t have to waste valuable time and resources on machines that weren’t going to sell – sorry Toshiba!

Now that they are sure where to focus their efforts, one of the industry’s biggest names and our new best friend, Dell, tops it off with cheap prices!

The Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook with Blu-ray Disc (BD) playback retails at a consumer friendly price of $879. That is almost half what you have to shell out for a Sony VAIO with BD playback – amazing! Plus, that is only double of what you have to shell out for the cheapest Samsung BD player – doubly amazing!

The basic set-up budget BD laptop comes in common jet black and runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz processor with 1GB DDR2 memory and 80GB hard drive (kind of small if you plan on saving BD content: 2 Blu-ray discs = 100GB).

The screen is a 15.4 inch high definition wide aspect display with 720p resolution – good enough for regular high def viewing. Plus, it also has an HDMI port so you can connect and watch on higher resolution displays and HDTVs.

It ships with the sucky Vista Home Basic – but who cares?

”Blu-ray is definitely moving into the mainstream,” said Anne Camden, spokesperson for Dell. ”If somebody is thinking of investing in a Blu-ray library, now’s the time because not only are they able to watch it at home but they can leverage that library and take it on the road, and it’s affordable to do.”

Take your BD library on the road? How? By burning? Did I say you can burn BD on the budget laptop? No, I did not. Because you cannot.

To be able to burn BD’s, you need to shell out $200 more; totalling your budget laptop to $1,079 – not budget! But, there is a huge but… this price is still comparatively cheaper. If you were to buy a BD writer separately, it would cost you around $350.

So, yes, I still recommend buying this sweet new gadget. Especially now that the BD vs HD DVD format war is over, we can start storing data on BD and not worry that in the future the format would be obsolete. And you know that pretty soon almost all media will be stored in BD and your laptop is ready for all of them. Plus, remember the last article I wrote on BD? Yup, the one where I said that BD can now be copied? It’s true. Imagine all the stuff waiting to be copied AND BURNED on your budget laptop. Ok, stop. I said imagine, not drool!

This is definitely a giant leap in the right direction. Soon, competitors will follow suit and more newer BD playback models will come out. Soon after that, prices will drop even more. It’s a great time to be a consumer!

To tell you the truth, I am going to wait it out even more. I won’t jump the gun with Dell just yet, but if you do have spare dollars (in G’s!) then grab an Inspiron 1525. Then tell us if it was worth the money!