Price range

[wouse101]

I heard through a good friend who works in a video shop about this new blu ray format. I have read the theory behind it and its very clever but, me being an electronics student and currently helping a friend set up a comupter business, that this is going to be expensive.

So maybe some of you could answer a few questions for me:

1. is it going to be expensive? whats the price range?
2. how soon is it going to be?

Also being and avid PC user, there is one important question I'd like to ask:

AMD and Intel have released, a while ago now, there 64-bit processors, and my colleuge has run into some problems with installing optical drivers under windows x64 (64-bit version of windows that allows to take full advantage of 64-bit processors). The main problem is.......THERE AREN'T ANY 64-BIT DRIVERS!

He's been trying to install the damn thing for weeks and scowered the internet and rung all the technical support lines. Eventually he gave up and installed windows XP (32-bit) sacrificing most of the potential useage of his processor.

I mentioned to him that Blu ray technology was just around the corner, he asked me to research into it (hence why im here asking these quetions).

So the other big question is:

When blu ray optical drives comes out for the PC market, are they going to be able to be installed onto 64-bit systems under 64-bit OS's?

'cos to be honest, I think everything needs to catch up with this amount of processing power.