Blu-ray has won

[Zotar]

http://www.techworld.com/storage/blo...=3&entryid=712

Blu-ray has won." It's as simple as that. This was the message coming from Richard George, the technical director of Westpoint, a supplier of JVC-built Blu-ray optical juke boxes.

The desktop box can have four magazines each with 50 Blu-ray disk slots - the drives are naked, not enclosed in cartridges - and up to six drives. Each disk is 2-layer and holds 50GB, so the box can hold up to 10TB. In terms of archive storage capacity per square foot this is pretty good. A taller box has 600 slots and we're looking at 30TB in one rack unit.
A 200-slotter with six drives will cost £15,000 - 20,000. It depends upon the software and the precise configuration. Westpoint is selling the things into the traditional medical image and document management markets. It hasn't gone into enterprise archiving as has Plasmon.
Anyway, back to Blu-ray. New figures show:-
- 73 percent of high-definition movie disks bought in Europe this year were in Blu-ray format, with 27 percent being HD-DVD. The numbers come from Media Control Gfk International.
- Equivalent figures for the USA from Home Media Research showed Blu-ray titles outselling HD-DVD by nearly two to one in the USA.
It's probable that Sony's Blu-ray-using PlayStation has resulting in over 20 million Blu-ray disk sales in Europe with high-definition movie sales contributing a million plus as well.
It could be that the tide is turning in Blu-ray's favour. George says that CDs and DVDs can be read by Westpoint's Blu-ray jukebox providing better backwards compatibility than HD-DVD.
But that doesn't mean Toshiba will give up with HD-DVD.