When Blu-ray and laptops collide
Sony's Vaio FW270 features a Blu-ray drive and a fair price.
If you're waiting for Blu-ray players to dip below the $99 mark before replacing your DVD player, let us offer an alternate solution: a Blu-ray-equipped laptop.
While Blu-ray drives first appeared on huge laptops with 18.4-inch screens that were capable of displaying 1080p video, we've now seen Blu-ray drives on laptops as small as the 11-inch Sony Vaio TT. With an HDMI port becoming an increasingly popular laptop feature, you're able to easily connect a laptop to an HDTV for HD movie playback. And with Blu-ray player prices dropping, you don't necessarily need to break the bank to bring home a Blu-ray-equipped laptop.
To wit, the Sony Vaio FW270 serves up a 16.4-inch display and modern configuration with its Blu-ray player for a very reasonable $1,299. And some models, like Sony's Vaio TT and AW laptops, feature Blu-ray recordable drives, which let you burn data to high-capacity Blu-ray Discs.
Take a gander at our Blu-ray laptop six-pack for more.
Not sure where the limitation is in my system but my thought is it's worth investigating the quality differences now that some stand-alone players are at or below $200.