Tosh Announces First Laptop With HD DVD-R

Laptops were always going to get HD DVD writeable drives sooner or later and Toshiba has thankfully decided on sooner.

In an logical upgrade to the excellent Qosmio G30-102 which blew Benny away last November, the company has confirmed that the laptop will soon be receiving the world’s first HD DVD-R drive. Consequently the fiddly digits that follow G30 will now read ‘97A’ instead of ‘102’ which, confusingly, actually sounds like a downgrade.

Elsewhere the G30 97A remains as terrifyingly fearsome as before with a stonking 17in 1920 x 1200 display for Full HD related hi-jinks, sports a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU, (just?) 1GB RAM, dual 160GB HDDs and a 256MB GeForce Go 7600 graphics card.

Being an HD purist’s machine the G30 97A also features the prerequisite HDMI port with HDCP along with every other connection this side of a NASA R&D lab: S-Video, S/PDIF, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, PCMCIA, ExpressCard, USB2.0, FireWire and on and on and on and…

At 400,000 yen (just £1,690) we can’t possibly hope to see a straight GBP conversion though it does suggest that the hardware for next gen media is already beginning to creep down. Well... a bit.

Link:
Toshiba UK