By Donnie Jenkins

Today I’d like to jump around a bit and discuss a few new trends and I’m following.

Clint Cooper wrote an excellent piece in last Tuesday’s Times Free Press on the sudden price decline of Blu-ray DVD players. A wonderful result of this change is that you can now buy a computer based Blu-ray disc recorder for under $300. These usually require that your computer have a SATA or Serial ATA interface.

You can buy a PCI or PCI-Express SATA card at a reasonable price at local electronics stores if your computer does not come equipped with this. Such a card also allows you to use SATA hard drives which are the latest standard in storage and speed.

Unfortunately, while Blu-ray drives have come down in price, Blu-ray recordable discs remain expensive. A single-layer, 25-gigabyte disc is $8 as of this writing, and the double-layer, 50-gigabyte disc costs about $20. This will change at some point, but for now Blu-ray is still a bit too expensive for storage and general use. I base this statement upon the fact that you can regularly buy 500-gigabyte SATA hard drives on sale for around $99.

Using a hard drive docking device such as the Thermaltake BlacX, you can swap hard drives as easily as you’d swap DVDs or CDs. While they are certainly larger and more bulky than the smaller discs, their increased storage capacity makes using them practical and inexpensive.

Digital movie downloads have been getting a lot of press lately. A new technology called Qflix has taken a interesting approach to selling movies online. This technology works by encoding a movie with copy protection, selling it as a download online, and allowing the buyer to use Qflix branded software, burners and discs to create a hard copy, which should play in any DVD player. If this works well, it will be a blessing to the digital movie download arena.

The online presentation site SlideRocket has come out of beta, meaning that anyone can now use the service. This site is getting great reviews as a PowerPoint substitute. PowerPoint is the most popular presentation software on the PC, although not the only good one. SlideRocket is an example of the cloud-computing concept in which everything is done online instead of on the desktop. I like services such as this when they work well, but any online offering will always be subject to network conditions and browser limitations and glitches.

Recently YouTube has enabled users to use deep video linking on their site. This basically means that a content creator can create links to specific parts of a video there, and the link will take them to the beginning of just that part. This could be a great tool for seminar teachers and presenters, as well as promotional videos for products.

Apple recently released several new laptops, but continues to price them above all the budget PC laptops. Leader Steve Jobs recently defended this move by saying that he didn’t know how to ship anything under or around $500 that didn’t look like junk. Some good news, though: the Mac Mini may be up for a new processor and other improvements if all goes well. It had been assumed that the Mac Mini was due to be discontinued, and this may still be the case, but a newer version of it would fit nicely into the under $1,000 area that Apple would otherwise ignore with its demise.

Finally, Samsung has released two Blu-ray DVD players that can stream video from Netflix. Roku has offered a $99 player for streaming from Netflix for some time, but the new Samsung offerings are a good start for having Netflix content available in different ways.

E-mail Donnie Jenkins at donniejenkins@yahoo.com.