HD DVD drives in all new Toshiba notebooks

A bid to increase HD DVD customer base

8 June 2007 8:12 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Toshiba's senior vice-president Hisatsugu Nonaka has said the company will start putting HD DVD drives in all its new laptops.

The move is an effort to try and give them a larger HD DVD customer base following disappointing sales figures for the high-def format.

Sony's Blu-ray drive is built-in to its PlayStation 3 gaming console, a move that saw Blu-ray disc sales surge ahead of HD DVD after the release of the machine.

Sony shipped 5.5 million PS3s up to March this year, which gives it a comfortable amount of consumers with Sony's version of the high-def disk format installed in their living rooms, however, figures from research firm IDC say that Toshiba shipped over 9 million notebooks last year, which if the same figures were repeated with HD DVD add-on, is not an inconsiderable number to win over to HD DVD.

Toshiba announced the "SD-L912A" at this year's COmputex event in Taiwan, a slim-line HD DVD rewriteable (RW) drive for laptop PCs that can read from and rewrite to single- and dual-layer HD DVD RW discs, re-recordable HD DVDs, DVDs, and CDs.

Toshiba's downfall with the new plan could be pricing - HD DVD drives are more expensive to manufacture than standard drives and customers may not want to pay premium prices for HD DVD-enabled notebooks.

This has led to some speculation that Tosh may take a hit on pricing in order to ensure that their next-gen disk technology gets ahead in the format war.