Its so much cheaper to add blue ray to a PC than to buy a stand alone player though... Its also not very expensive to rent Blu-ray through Netflix and the available library is growing steadily.

I think people are just stuck thinking that they need a stand alone player because they always have for other media, and don't realize that their PC can do everything they would use most stand alone devices for.

Until we get to the point where games take multiple DVDs so it becomes tempting to start putting them on bluray I dont think bluray players are going to start being used normally. If they could get the price down below 80 then they might start selling more of them, but im not going to spend more on an optical drive than i spent on my hard drive.

As has always been the case, if they start producing 1080P porn, or as hunter mentioned, games requiring the space of blu ray, it will never catch on fully.

Why would I want overpriced 25GB non-rewritable storage, where I could get 1 TB hard drive that is easily portable with enclosure, for much much less.

"the Blu-ray drive is facing difficulty in booting out the DVD-RW"

That is a reason why I wouldn't buy a blu-ray rom for my computer. Also the price is expensive and its not worth anything unless more technology occurs.

I agree. I've always hated optical media. They're slow, unreliable, (for most cases) read-only, and just a hassle to deal with. I probably won't ever buy a standalone blu-ray player. I might get a drive for my computer...but with downloadable content services, why bother? I can take all my movies with me on a hard disk, instead of taking a bajillion optical disks in their cases.

Damned analysts never actually ask anyone for a real opinion...

I'll tell you why it's not taking off plain and simple, it's the same reason DVDs in PCs lagged: writers are WAY too expensive, and media is scarce and even MORE expensive, and as yet, copying a BD to a BD-R is nowhere near cost effective, has compatability issues with players, and is still illegal. We're waiting for legal copying in the next release of the blueray firmware, PC based writers to drop to below the $100 mark, and for disks to drop to the $2 mark or lower... Also, some software to make writing a BRD easy needs to come along.

In 6-12 months, hardware prices should be in line, disk prices may get close to $1.50 each per 100 disks, and we'll see (hopefully) an answer to the legal copying debate. Then these things will fly off shelves.

The problem is cost and usablity. A regular DVDRW can do 90% of what the blueray drives can do and faster yet the BD's are several times more expensive. So these things are luxury items, not must haves.

It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. The ball is in the manufacturers court, not the consumer court.

It's the cost of the media that has kept me from buying a blue ray player for the PC. I can nearly buy a hard drive for the cost of a re-writable blue ray blank.

I'd probably have a BD drive by now if I didn't have to deal with all of this HDCP garbage just to watch a movie in HD. I would have to buy a new monitor and video card.

I think everyone is mostly echoing the article in different words. Bottom line is that consumers just don't see the value in blue-ray (cuz there isn't much value for them yet) and won't until blue-ray content movies/media become more ubiquitous.

The drives wont take of until burnable media gets cheaper.
The choice of an optical drive for me has always been driven by backup of data.

Blu-ray is bombing because Blu-ray is a videophile format. Sure, it looks better and sounds better, but most people would rather just go DVD and avoid the expense and hassle of Blu-ray.

And its really bombing in the PC world because there's still no affordable burnable media for Blu-ray drives. No user-made burnt Blu-ray media (due to its expense & slow speed) + more than adequate DVD movie quality + plentiful and cheap DVD+R/-R media = no real need for Blu-ray drives, esp. if you already have an extensive DVD movie collection.

I'm not planning on upgrading to Blu-ray anytime soon anyways...even if I do get an HD tv. I was a big supporter for Blu-ray in the format wars, but I don't care at all anymore since there seems to be no progress with the archival aspects of the media.

If you're a rich bastard however :-), I suppose its good to have *something* new to spend your money on.

PC users don't have much incentive to have a blu ray reader if they are happy watching semi-HD content online, often for free at that (assuming they don't have metered internet use ). Of course that means that if you want to burn data to use on another computer, it has to have a Blu Ray reader too, and if it doesn't you just wasted an expensive disk. Sure sometimes you need to move more data than a DVD allows, but with 16GB flash drives and above selling so cheap, as well as their ability to be used on most computers, using a BD disk instead doesn't seem as attractive.

I originally switched to burning DVDs when the cost per disk was cheap enough to do so. I pretty much looked at it as the cost per CD + a cd case, or sleeve if your being cheap, for each one was a little more than one DVD and one sleeve or slim case for backing up the same amount of data. Also it doesn't seem like burning those 25GB blu ray disks would save me too much time over burning 5 or 6 DVDs with my high speed plextor. Once Blu Ray media falls below $1 a disk and blu ray readers become cheaper, then they may have a chance of replacing DVDs for storage.

At this rate, Blu Ray will be replaced by the next thing before it ever becomes mainstream.

I'm waiting for blank blu-ray disks to go down in price.

IT IS POINTLESS RIGHT NOW...

I'm am not excited about blueray because my eyes do not notice any improvement with blueray.

I am not excited about 1080p because my eyes do not notice any improvement over 720p.

I am not excited about an HTPC because I already have a perfectly good dvd player.

I am not excited about watching a movie on my pc monitor when I'm busy doing something else like answering questions at Tom's Hardware. I do not multi-task very well.

I am not excited about watching a movie on my 22 inch pc monitor in the den when I have an excellent 48 inch plasma TV and home theater system in the living room which includes the previously mentioned dvd player.

I don't even want a bluray drive unless it is burnable and those are still more than I want to pay... I would buy one for $50 if I could convice the wifie. Even then... HDD's have 10X or more capacity and at ten times the storage... You can get those 500GB drives for $50. The video quality difference from an upscaled DVD to a blu ray is only noticable on a LARGE (about 48" or more) 1080 screen. Upscaled DVD's are fine with me for now... I'll wait for the whole blu ray pricing to come down on.. the movies, blank disks and the players/burners.

OOPS! I forgot something - I do not need blueray to watch a live broadcast of a Sunday afternoon football game with my friends. I just need beer.

bluray media is too expensive to justify buying a burner right now. hard drives are cheaper to store stuff on so of course bluray isn't going to win out. plus it is becoming better known that optical media doesn't last very long for archiving data.

where are all of you getting your prices from? bluray burners for PC are less than 130 bux US and 25gb media is 5 bux a piece... 50gb media for 20bux... while these numbers aren't as low as DVDr.. they're not astronomical as many have put it and the burners run at 6x... not a huge speed hit that would make burning a 25gb disc intolerable... the prices of this tech is dropping faster than anyone here appears to notice... and for the PC user... this format of optical disc will be just as useful as the DVDr and CDr before it once prices bottom out like they have in the older tech. make no mistake... the price on this tech is coming around to a level deemed acceptable by the masses quicker than you think!

Blu-rays will see a boost once the media finds other means to affect the market, such as blu-ray gaming. I think that 2013 prediction will be off by quite a bit once they find another breathrough or use with blu-rays.

and no one seems to know that Verbatim has developed a process to make BD-R media just as cheap as DVD-r... so give it time...

lol, and thats why Sony always fails with their new "formats" lol. Remember sony's mini disc's? the UMD? lol

Bluray for PCs is bombing because of several reasons

1. Bluray movies look great on a 40" screen, no real benefit is seen on a 15" laptop or a 19" TFT, irrespective of whether if it can display the resolution or not.

2. If you shop around you can get 10 x DVD-R for around £1, at that price they are disposable so you can afford to waste hundreds no big deal, but blank Bluray disks can set me back over £5 EACH! That 50 times more expensive for 5 times the capacity.

3. Costs of the writers are way too high, I dont care if the comparison to stand alone is good, you should be comparing it to computer products, not home theatre products. I can get a simple DVD-RW drive for around £16, the BD-RW for £138, thats 8.5 times as much!

4. Even the films themselves are more expensive, I looked at HMV's website and the new releases like "I Love You Man" were list price £20 and £25 for DVD vs Bluray, even the discount price is £13 and £17, so there is no incentive.

All these prices are the cheapest I could find with a specialist eTailers but high street prices would obviously be much higher.

Anyone who is seriously involved in piracy is not not put off by the cost as £5.25 for a blank and sell it for £10 will make a small fortune and end users get a bargain so they have no reason to buy real ones. Copy protection is a joke if you know the right software.

The simple answer is this. Drop the price. Across the board. Players, burners, media, movies. Piracy will always be there, the idea is that with realistic pricing the whole uptake is higher and the profits offset the piracy losses many times over. Plus when the uptake is higher we can all appreciate hi-def movies and not feel like we have been hosed for the privilige.

""In fact, the company predicts that only 16.3-percent of the PCs shipped in 2013 will feature installed Blu-ray drives, only up 3.6-percent from this year.""

I am gunna throw my own prediction out there...
By 2013, 85% of all PC's will come standard with a blueray/DVD combo drive.

How can they possibly predict where the market will be in four years?!

DVD burner, 30-40$. Blue Ray is 220$ +. I'm talking Canadian pricing. It's too expensive, we all know they'll be bellow 100$ soon enough, so we're waiting it out. Media is also too expensive.

Until it's cheap, I'll just keep burning (so rarely) on single / double layer dvd-r.

Sucks to be you. I find it very easy to see the difference. Blu-Ray vs DVD is relative to the difference between SD TV and HD TV. Of course there are also people who will tell you the only difference between SD and HD is aspect ratio.

That said I can understand why Blu-Ray is lagging in regular PCs. I have an HTPC but if it wasn't for that I wouldn't have Blu-Ray in any of my PCs. But if they were a little cheaper, even for just a player, say like $50 I'd put them in all of my PCs standard. It's nice to know I can read any major format on my PC even if I don't frequently use them. It's really annoying when I come across an older machine that doesn't even have a DVD drive and want to install Linux (off a DVD). It will probably be the same with Blu-Ray in a couple of years.

I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my computer, grabbed the transformers movie to watch, and then I tried playing my movie on my computer ...World of hurt!

Apparently there are only a handful of programs on the market that allow Blu-Ray discs to be watched on a PC-Theater system. Instead of paying $200 for a program I knew nothing about, I found a cracked version of Cyberlink DVD. Sure, the picture is in 1080p, but the frames skip every 30 seconds. I do not have a slow system, and had freshly installed windows twice to try to fix it. I only bothered with the Blu-Ray because I wanted a flawless picture... which doesn't exist on a PC. I was too annoyed by the constant frame skipping to enjoy the movie.

Fix DRM (which means get rid of it) and then people will buy Blu-rays. As long as PC drives require $200 software that doesn't work I don't see why people would bother to buy a drive in the first place.

Until BD-R discs are more cost effective than HDDs (and I don't think that that will happen any time soon with the advent of 2TB and 2.5TB hard drives and ever decreasing costs per GB) I don't see the general population buying BD-Writers.

Me - I'll stick to large HDDs.

500 gb hdd = 49$
1000gb hdd = 130$

20 X 25gb blue ray disks = 200$ (@ 8bucks, most places have them at 10-13)
cheap ass burner = 100$ (Lite On iHES208-08 Blu-ray Burner)

how much Data do you need to "burn"(BACKUP)

yeah thats the reason