Saturday, March 29, 2008

Dell Entry level laptops get Blu-ray

Dell is the first manufacturer to offer a portable with a Blu-ray below 1000€ and even under 900€.
This machine is still unbalanced with a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, its resolution of 1280x800 and above all the GMA X3100 (integrated) video board, but apparently is capable of playing a Blu-ray movie in conditions still needing to be verified.
In fact, the processor may need to give everything it has to decode the video, which might be saturated, make noise and have far too low an autonomy.
But the most interesting thing is the the price, proving that with putting a little more money, a few hundred euros, we could get a really well equiped machine. It is sufficient to add a decent graphics chip capable of ensuring hardware decoding of H.264 so that the video decoding is better.
We look forward, of course, to Apple offering decoding Blu-ray in its machines but also authoring for this format on the Mac Pro. Toast 9 is already doing it, but in a frustrat way, but at least proving it is possible to do.

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