BWU-1000A Sony Blu-Ray burner and player
$1399
www.sony.com.au

Want to store up to 50Gb of data on a single Blu-Ray disc at home or in the office? Son’y new Blu-Ray Disc rewriteable drive has arrived and lets you do just that with single layer 25Gb discs and double-layer 50Gb discs.

While Sony released a Blu-Ray drive in their recent Blu-Ray equipped notebook computer, this is their first drive for use in desktop computer. At a cost of $1399 retail, with disc prices starting at (from memory) $35 for a single layer disc, it’s clearly still expensive to dive into this format right now, especially with talk of companies thinking of offering drives that can playback and record to drives that can read and write to CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs all in the one unit. Pioneer is said to be releasing such a drive sometime in 2007.

So while Sony clearly does not support HD-DVD (as it it pushing the Blu-Ray barrow), Sony’s BD drive also supports recording of standard single layer 4.7GB DVD+R/+RW/-R/-RW/-RAM discs, 8.5GB DVD+/-R Double/Dual Layer Discs, and standard recordable/rewritable CDs, in addition to the two different types of Blu-Ray disc available now, making the BWU-1000A multi-format burner. The write-once discs are known as BD-R, while re-writeable discs are known as BD-RE discs.

That said, if you need Blu-Ray write and re-write capabilities now, this 2x speed drive will certainly do the job. Given how much more data can be stored onto a Blu-Ray disc compared with a regular blank DVD, recording time is much slower, but this is to be expected. Currently, a full 25Gb Blu-Ray disc can be recorded in approximately 50 minutes.

The BWU-100A is capable of playing back commercial Blu-ray movies as well as personally created Blu-ray content. Commercial Blu-ray movies can be viewed on computers that incorporate an HDCP-compliant graphics card offering DVI or HDMI connections, an external display device with DVI or HDMI connections, and software that supports BD playback, along with the Blu-ray drive itself. The VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook from Sony is presently capable of showing these movies and third parties are developing the software required for commercial Blu-ray film playback, which will be available to consumers before commercial Blu-ray films launch in Australia later this year.

For personal content captured on a HDV camcorder, the BD drive is optimised for keeping the video in the native HDV 1080i for playback on home players compatible with BD-AV format and PCs with BD drives installed.

The internal drive features an IDE (ATA/ATAPI) interface and standard 5.25-inch form factor for easy installation inside a PC.

$1399

Related:

Entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 12:45 am under Storage, Technology.

Read more entries by Staff reporters.
Stumble It!