Notebook Blu-Ray Drives, the New Battery Killers

The final victory of the Blu-Ray standard over HD-DVD has brought on the market a plethora of extremely affordable notebook drives, so high-definition enthusiasts will have yet another opportunity to enjoy their favorite titles even when on the road.

Things may seem simple, yet they're not exactly like that. The promise of having a wide range of high-definition titles for your own mobile enjoyment is crippled by the fact that the Blu-Ray drive may prove itself a powerhog. According to technology analysts, as fas as the first generation of Blu-Ray devices, you're going to run out of battery power before watching half of the movie.

"Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern," says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin. "If you bought an iPhone and you couldn't watch a two-hour movie, which you barely can now, that would be a huge problem," Martin continued.

Batteries evolve at a slower pace than any other computer component, and there is no Moore's Law equivalent for this kind of hardware and small steps are considered important advances. More than that, batteries are the last item on notebook manufacturer's "To-Do" list, as they have other pieces of hardware to stuff inside the laptops at first.

The introduction of the notebook Blu-Ray drives have made things worse in respects of battery autonomy, and notebook vendors would beat around the bush rather than revealing the precise impact of such drives over the laptop's battery. If the allegations prove to be true, then the battery's autonomy can reduce to a mere single hour.

"The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. "Any time you introduce a new technology like this, the initial products tend to be more power-hungry. Once you get to a certain point, though, the industry usually starts the refinement process," he continued.

The laser is not the only element to be held responsible for the power drain. The high-definition streams need to be decoded and turned into motion pictures on the screen. If the decoding is done via software, it will easily eat up processing cycles and power.

"We looked at playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and our early data showed that it could knock [battery life] down to half when playing a Blu-ray disc," said Dell's Brian Zucker, who also sits on a committee of the Blu-ray Association.

However, if you are one of the mobile HD enthusiasts, don't despair: there are some notebooks that can playback two whole movies on a single battery pack. The above-mentioned models are Dell's XPS M1530 and Inspiron 1420, that are alleged to support about 4 hours of Blu-Ray playback.