Tech time warp: Fujitsu releases new laptops with a choice of DVD or Blu-ray drives

If you haven't heard about the return of the optical drive to the world of PCs, you have now - Fujitsu has some new notebooks coming out that boast such drives.

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As Fudzilla reports (via VideoCardz), this is happening over in Japan, where there's currently a resurgence in the popularity of optical drives which is tied in with support for Windows 10 ending (as we've seen in other recent media reports, such as Tom's Hardware).

Whether there's an element of exaggeration in the apparently booming sales of DVD drives in Japan - caused by people wanting to keep playing their physical media discs after upgrading to a new Windows 11 PC - it's difficult to say for sure. But clearly there's enough of a need for Fujitsu to produce notebooks that have both DVD and Blu-ray drives on board.

A desktop PC is one thing, but a laptop is obviously not ideal for an optical drive given the element of thickness this adds, and the space it takes up in the chassis.

The Fujitsu FVM Note laptops include four different models that use Intel (Raptor Lake) and AMD (Ryzen 7735) chips. They're relatively wallet-friendly systems starting from the equivalent of $800 over in Japan. It's unlikely these portables will be sold outside of the country, of course (though I guess similar devices might).

Blu-ray in particular remains popular in Japan due to being able to watch films in their full glory, as opposed to the version of 4K that a streaming service will present you with. Obviously, any streamed film or TV show will be limited by your internet connection, and subject to a good deal of compression which takes a lot of the edge off the sharpness of a 4K image.

Recently Cooler Master released a mid-tower case that sports a 5.25-inch optical drive bay, which is all part of this fascination with old-school discs - and retro vibes in general.