Blu-ray Burner Prices Getting Cheaper

High definition has been making big waves since last year. Both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc formats have been gaining huge sales in the movie industry. In light of these recent developments, I began to wonder if consumers are ready to make 1:1 copies of their hard earned BD’s and HD-DVD’s.

Enter the Blu-ray and HD-DVD burners. However, since this is a Blu-ray article, HD-DVD burners won’t be discussed. ExtremeTech just reviewed a relatively cheaper Blu-ray burner. Lite-On LH-2B1S debuts for under US $500 and is competently comparable to the more expensive Sony BWU-100A Blu-ray burner (around US $750). It can burn single layered BD’s and all DVD formats (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+R DL, DVD-R DL, LightScribe not supported) at substantial speeds. Lite-On LH-2B1S is a SATA device, so a motherboard that supports SATA is required. By the way, this is Lite-On’s first internal Blu-ray disc burner. Let’s see how it compares with the Sony brand.

Based on similar specs, ExtremeTech found out in its benchmarks that Sony BWU-100A performed better than LiteOn LH-2B1S, but not much (only an 8% margin on reading DVD-ROM’s and almost ties with Sony on writing BD’s). Read ExtremeTech’s review to find out more.

What’s the verdict? Well, Blu-ray burner prices are getting cheaper but for the non-hardcore, tech savvy consumers, there are a thousand things worth buying more than a Blu-ray burner. Lite-On LH-2B1S may be worth an investment because of its better performance and a rather lower price tag, but with Blu-ray disc media still at premium prices, it would be too early to make back up copies of BD’s.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 11:46 and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.