News for Friday, 6 January 2006

The Las Vegas CES is the best place for both sides to demonstrate their blue-laser-based future DVD format and its advantages in order to attract new supporters.
The biggest news for HD-DVD side was coming from Microsoft that has announced an optional external HD-DVD drive for its Xbox360.
Toshiba has demoed a notebook equipped with a HD-DVD drive, and should release a HD-DVD standalone player in March.
For the Blu Ray side, Pioneer has officially announced the availability of the first BR burner for the end on January. It will "only" cost 995$US; just to remind you it was the price of a DVD burner 5 years ago. Mid-2006 Philips should release its first BDR/DVDR/CDR burner.
Panasonic has also announced the price of the first BR media: a BD-R 25GB will cost 17.99$ whereas a BD-R with a double storage capacity (50GB) will cost 42,99$. BD-RW media will also be available and should cost 24,99$ and 59,99$ respectively for the 25 and 50GB models.
Sony has announced the first BD standalone player for this summer.

Nvidia has added 3 new notebook-dedicated GPU to its catalog: GeForce Go 7800, GeForce Go 7600 and GeForce Go 7400.
The rather surprising point in the PR is the way the list of manufacturers, adopting those new GPUs for their last Centrino-based notebooks, is provided:

ASUS, Acer, Gateway, LG, Samsung, SONY, and others

usually, one tries to get the longest and the most detailed list possible. Maybe one of the last nVidoa GPU users does not wish to get its name publicly released for the time being... Apple?

Hardware.fr has published the new yearly HD failure/crash rate for the 4 largest manufacturer:
W. Digital 1.02%
Hitachi : 1.16%
Maxtor : 1.44%
Seagate : 1.57%
Those results remain close to last year's figures, and proves that the risk of loosing data due to a HD crash can not be neglected. Be careful, those numbers might vary dramatically depending on the HD models from the same manufacturer, and even between lot numbers for the same HD. Do not forget to take into account that last year Seagate was the one producing the most reliable HDs according to this test. So behind a single number, they might exist huge variations; so before buying an new HD browse on the web to know if it is not a model well-known for its poor reliability.