10. PC HD-DVD Players/Burners

Buffalo Technology HDV-ROM2.4 FB Internal Player

Buffalo Technology is perhaps best known for its external storage offerings, particularly RAID arrays. Nevertheless, the company is the first to offer a retail HD-DVD player/burner to the market - but at present, only in Japan. Though US retail pricing for the unit is pegged at $338, upon contacting the maker we learned that they do not currently plan to offer it for sale in North America. Because this unit is built around the Toshiba SD-H802A full-height internal HD-DVD player/burner, we provide no additional technical detail about this unit, except to lament its lack of availability in our primary market (and start us wondering about how we might arrange mail-order from Japan).

Figure 7: Until you see the HD-DVD logo at the right, the HDV-ROM2.4 FB looks like any other full-height internal DVD drive.

While a trip to your favorite search engine using the maker's name and model number will turn up lots of resources, we found the following items most informative as we tried to track this HD-DVD player down:

The Japan, Inc. newsletter for December 25, 2006: look for the second entry, entitled "Buffalo HDV-ROM2.4FB" Akihabaranews.com covers high-tech equipment and gadgetry from Japan; their December 6, 2006 news posting covers the HDV-ROM2.4FB player CDRinfo covers optical media and storage, primarily for the UK market. They picked up the Buffalo Technology offering on December 6, 2006, the same day as December 7, 2006