Blu-Ray disk drives are already a common appearance in the PC distribution sector and Toshiba has announced that they are planning to release half-height HD DVD drives early next year. This would be the first PC enabled HD-DVD burner to see the market in a long time, since the last model has been unveiled by Toshiba in late 2006.

Toshiba's policy was oriented towards original equipment manufacturers rather than on the retail market and the company has channeled the slim-type HD DVD drives through its Quosmio notebooks, but other notebook manufacturers, including Acer and Asus are planning to include it in their future high-end notebooks to appear until the end of the year.

"We are concentrating for PC OEM because we believe this is the best way for HD DVD to be defacto-standard", explains Shigeyuki Miyazaki, Senior Manager of HD DVD Drive Product Planning, Toshiba. "Therefore, HD DVD Drive product for retail is now limited", he added.

At the moment, there is a plethora of manufacturers to deliver Blue-Ray drives, such as LiteOn, Pioneer, Philips, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Samsung and HLDS. The later manufacturers have released their Super Multi Blue burners that are able to read BD and HDVD media. Panasonic is cooking a new optical drive to be a BD Combo (Blu-ray/HD DVD-ROM) drive, that will be on sale until the year's end.

Another major player on the battlefield is NEC that have made huge leaps in the HD-DVD media and have showcased various drive prototypes in the latest years. Since Nec does not have an Optical Disc Division anymore, the company has joined Sony to manufacture Blu-Ray drives for PCs.

"Now we can see HD DVD PCs are increasing quantity, so we are considering the release of Half Height HD DVD Burner Drive for both OEM and Retail from mid of next year as the second step", Shigeyuki Miyazaki continued.