Introduction

"Albatron Introduce Blue Ray decoder card!" - This is what I saw sitting up the top of the TweakTown news one day. Steve our news guy does a fantastic job of the news but I noticed a little error in his title, it's Blu-ray not Blue Ray, and nothing annoys me more than people saying the latter. Before I hand out an ear bashing to him though, I thought it's worth having a look at this "Blue Ray Decoder" card and to my shock no mistake was made on our end. Albatron decided to go with Blue Ray.

While I was running around in circles throwing my arms in the air going "WTF!", it really dawned on me that while a lot of people have probably heard of Blu-ray they possibly haven't seen logos or really acknowledged the spelling of it; so Albatron can turn around, throw the word "Blu-ray" into the mix and deliberately misspell it 'Blue Ray', not having to worry about Sony or the other creators of Blu-ray coming down on them like a ton of bricks.

Everything becomes a little clearer as you read the press release though; this Blue Ray Decoder Card is basically just a poor performing video card with HD processing capabilities. You say "OMG, that's just mean", but I say "I want the Albatron marketing team." This could be the greatest marketing idea ever!

Well, that was until we got our hands on it. Let's move forward and check out the whole story behind this "Decoder Card".