Sony's Blu-ray laptop to launch next week

The Sony Vaio AR Premium will cost $3,500 (£2,000 for a similar UK edition). Along with a Blu-ray drive, the laptop will come with an Intel Core Duo processor, 1GB of memory, a 17-inch screen and a complimentary copy of the movie House of Flying Daggers in the Blu-ray format. Sony is taking preorders for the computer on its site.

Meanwhile, Vaio AR laptops with a DVD burner instead of a Blu-ray player will start at $1,800.

The launch of the Blu-ray-enabled laptop will mark Sony's commercial push into the high-definition disc wars. By the end of June, the company will also release the RC240 desktop, a multimedia PC that will come with a Blu-ray drive.

Meanwhile, Sony will begin to take preorders for its BDP-S1 Blu-ray player on 15 August, said a Sony representative. The unit will officially come out when Sony releases a new line of Bravia flat-screen TVs and Grand Wega rear-projection TVs around late August and early September.

Previously, the BDP-S1 was due to come out in July.

The Japanese electronics giant, which is in the middle of a fashioning a comeback, will also put a Blu-ray player in the PlayStation 3 next-generation games console, which will start at around £300 but won't come out until later in the year. The PlayStation 3 price is also subsidised in part by Sony, which hopes to make up the difference in game sales.

Sony, Philips, Samsung and others are promoting Blu-ray as the format for replacing DVDs for playing, storing and recording movies. While Blu-ray discs hold more than discs based on the rival HD DVD standard, Blu-ray equipment costs more than HD DVD equipment.

Toshiba has already released an HD DVD player in the US that sells for just under $500. Still, analysts say the prices on players and drives based on both standards will drop over time.

So far, consumers have expressed wariness about buying players based on either standard out of fear of being stuck with the one that gets abandoned. Although it's technically possible to make a single player that can play Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, the licensing and legal restrictions make it difficult for companies to release dual players.

South Korea's LG Electronics has said it will release a player that can handle both kinds of discs, but most companies are for the moment sticking with one format or another. (Royalties matter here. Sony, Philips and some of the others that contributed intellectual property to the Blu-ray standard stand to earn millions in licensing fees and the same is true for the HD DVD camp.)

To get around the problem, some PC makers will sell computers with either kind of drive.

The Blu-ray drive in the Vaio AR records in high definition, but it records video from camcorders. Sony, like other Blu-ray manufacturers, is working to prevent these machines from becoming vehicles for piracy.