Sony Offers ‘All-in-One’ Blu-ray/PC/HDTV at Retailer

Will the Blu-ray disc ever achieve the ubiquity that standard DVD has? It will, if Blu-ray chief proponent Sony has its way.

Electronics chain Best Buy has begun selling a new “all-in-one” Vaio-brand desktop PC/HDTV from Sony that includes a Blu-ray drive.

The combo unit comes with a 22-inch LCD widescreen and is packed with an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 3GB DDR2 RAM, 640GB hard drive. It holds a slot loading drive that reads (and writes) Blu-ray discs. The new Vaio unit includes an Nvidia GeForce 8400 GT GPU, and 802.11n technology.

Sony has also routinely included Blu-ray drives in its PlayStation 3 game consoles—an early tactic that some analysts believe helped it win the next-gen format war against the HD DVD format last winter.