Even as DVD writer drives continue to dominate the notebook and laptop market, Toshiba hopes that laptops and notebooks with HD-DVD drives will hit under $1,000 just in time for Christmas shopping.

According to PC World HD-DVD was first available on the Toshiba Qosmio earlier this year and has spread out to a few other high-end laptops since.  The price for a Qosmio with an HD-DVD drive started at $3,000 but is now down around $1,500.

Carl Pinto, vice president of product development and product management at Toshiba says,

“By the end of the year, in time for Christmas, you’ll be able to buy notebook computers (with HD-DVD drives) at retail stores for under $1000.”

Toshiba has seen hardware improvements reduce the cost necessary to support an HD-DVD drive.  When first introduced it would require a dedicated graphics card and high-end CPU to handle the decoding process.  Now, most of the processing has been shifted to the CPU and an integrated graphics card with a hardware decoder which costs about $200, half the previous price and Toshiba hopes to halve that price again.

The company says that HD-DVD will become an option on “most of its notebook computers” and hopes to ship 5 million HD-DVD enabled computers over the next year.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 4:00 pm under Notebook, Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
Stumble It!