Samsung SH-B022 Blu-ray burner reviewed

It's not every day you get to play with a pre-production Blu-ray burner, but the team at Germany's CT Magazine were able to get their hands on a Samsung SH-B022, and liked what they saw. The burner, which doesn't have AACS copy-protection, was able to burn a 25GB disc in about 43 minutes, and had no trouble playing a range of CDs and DVDs. The reviewers also found that the drive didn't generate as much heat as some other models they've tested; it reached a manageable 107 degrees after a burn. The final model is due out in April for about $500, and will include copy protection, along with the ability to write double-layer 50GB discs.

[Via I4U]

[Warren G @ Feb 16th 2006 5:38PM]

You know, it's amazing what people will argue about these days...let's just say read the whole thing before putting down a product. It's quite obvious that the people who are 'hating' on the new (and NEW is the keyword) burners don't need this product, so, close your browser window and keep going. DO you think people were complaining about the 640k of HD space when they got a state-of-the-art PC? What about when there was no Windows, and you had to run a program through a cassette HD that could take HOURS just to run it?!...my dad still has his. My point..just be happy for the product, and YES, this is the first generation for the BR burners...remember, the CD burners used to burn at 1X MAX...or the ROM drive itself READ at 1X...so, stop complaining, and go out and buy your 52x CD burners, and watch your CD's quality slowly diminish!...And that's my 2 cents worth!

And DVD-DL was not a waste of time...remember, not all of us owns, or has the funds to upgrade to, a 3 GHz processor!

Gotta Love Technology!!

[Siege @ Feb 20th 2006 1:58PM]

25-50GB of storage on a disc is fabulous and there are certainly uses for this amount of space. My digital camera saves 90 images per GB; just storing Christmas images took me 3 DVDs. Still, even I don't need this much space for most projects.

I would suggest that this technology needs to compliment DVD and DVD-DL. We need the ability to record a Blue-ray, but also to revert to the DVD and DVD-DL discs when only a limited space is required... at least until the Blue-Ray media is affordable.

[Ron @ Mar 10th 2006 4:51AM]

I'm eagerly waiting for the Blu Ray burner, since my HDs are clogging up with 10+ gb files. A movie in 1080i format is above 10gb. If you have, like me, a HDTV and a HDTV beamer, you want everything to be as clear and sharp as 1080i or 720p. You don't watch movies in 256 colors either. If you're used to it, you don't want anything else. Right now I'm just buying more and more and more HDs to be able to keep the HDTV files, since burning them is no option yet.

[Neomus @ Apr 14th 2006 4:34PM]

I' d rather buy me an external harddisk. Way cheaper in the end, rewritable, and can also be transported. I don' t get the fuss about this.

[Music Archiver @ Apr 20th 2006 10:04AM]

Well I for one, would love to be able to reduce my music backup from 110 DVD-r's, (or 55 DVD-DL), to about 10 BD-DL discs.

Anyone who a terabyte or more of data on backup will know what I am saying.

But for the "Hollywood" thing, nahh.. Buy a new player, and buy a new TV and Reciever to actually use your product. No thanks... WHen I upgrade to an HD TV, then I will consider it for entertainment purposes.

[Dissent @ Jan 26th 2006 11:41AM]

Whoa. I didnt even know these were available as burners already... thats awesome. I feel like i just jumped on the dvd-burner bandwagon, too.

[skype_fan @ Jan 26th 2006 11:44AM]

43 Minutes for 25 GB , hello are we in stoneage ?

[Lectoid @ Jan 26th 2006 11:49AM]

43 Minutes for 25 GB , hello are we in stoneage ?

Remember when CD and DVD burners came out, they had long burn times too. This is most likely a 1x burner. They may get faster in the future, just keep your panties on.

[Jon Graft @ Jan 26th 2006 11:54AM]

$500 is way to much! I'd love to have one but only if it were $100 or less...

Also, on a side note, do you think it will have LightScribe built in??? That'd be SICK!

[anthonysimilion @ Jan 26th 2006 11:57AM]

It's still faster, comparatively, than writing a single layer DVD at 16x. Don't forget this is first generation - first generation DVD writers wrote at 1x, taking ~60 minutes to write a single layer disc.

[Brendan @ Jan 26th 2006 11:57AM]

yeah, where's the huge increase in speed over current DVDs?

[J Dawg @ Jan 26th 2006 11:59AM]

Well at 8x it can take 12 minutes or so to burn a 4.7 gb dvd, so even assuming the same speed (which there isn't really reason to do as it is a different technology), 25 gb could take over an hour.

Unless you were trying to be sarcastic, if that was the case I apologize and it was pretty funny.

[kilo113 @ Jan 26th 2006 12:02PM]

nope, that's about same speed as 8x dvd burning; not really stoneage, eh? much more capacity, same speed, though.

anyway $500! if hd-dvd burners come in at a lot cheaper, then i'd go for that.

[Pip @ Jan 26th 2006 12:10PM]

Thats pretty damn fast compared to todays DVD burners, actually.

[suntiger @ Jan 26th 2006 12:13PM]

What software can actually burn Blu-ray right now?

[Dirty6 @ Jan 26th 2006 12:13PM]

So does this bad boy burn DVDs and CDs as well? Or just Blu-Ray?

[Pal @ Jan 26th 2006 12:15PM]

Too expensive?

I remember buying a new 8x DVD burner for $250. Before that, I got a newly released 12x CD burner for $270.

Stop complaining, these aren't for regular Joe's, it's for professionals and people with too much money. Wait a few years.

[E-Rock @ Jan 26th 2006 12:16PM]

Question? Why is this Blu-Ray writer the size of a normal drive and the BR players are the size of a small cabinet?

[Pal @ Jan 26th 2006 12:19PM]

Nero already supports Blu-Ray, I'm sure that others have some support or are working on it.

Why are the players huge? If you think about it, the writer is pretty huge. You're forgetting about your own computer that it's in.

[skype_fan @ Jan 26th 2006 12:38PM]

so if this is 1x burner, are we still in the real world test rabbit environment and they already call it a usable product ? Getting tired of this v1.0 releases. If it already takes them ages to get this stuff ready why not wait another 6 months till it is 8x or more and release it then.

[Pal @ Jan 26th 2006 12:47PM]

"If it already takes them ages to get this stuff ready why not wait another 6 months till it is 8x or more and release it then."

Who does that? If Sony does this and Toshiba doesn't Toshiba will gain a stronghold that Sony wouldn't be able to take back. The thing is, if they released an 8x version, you'd still be dissatisfied until they waited aanother six months to release a 16x version.

They're not releasing this as the one-drive-to-rule-them-all, but as a technology showcase that tells the world that indeed they can make such technical leaps over the past generation.

[ShureFooT @ Jan 26th 2006 1:22PM]

$500 isn't too bad, considering most of the "next-generation" stand alone players cost more.

What I'm more interested in is how much for the blank/writable media?

[evilroo @ Jan 26th 2006 1:29PM]

Google's German-to-English translation of this page is the funniest thing I've ever seen. Awesome, but funny.
How does that work anyway?

[Bronish @ Jan 26th 2006 1:45PM]

Let's stop complaining about speed, eh? Aside from the fact that we're talking 1st gen here, remember that it's a TERRIBLE idea to burn modern optical discs at high speeds. Most videophiles recommend nothing faster than 4x to burn a DVD, regardless of what your burner is capable of. Burning a CD at 48x or whatever is fine...that's like going 200mph on the Autobahn. Burning a DVD at that speed, however, is more like going 200 down a Manhattan backstreet alley. 48x on Blu-Ray, if it were even possible, would be an even WORSE idea, something akin to driving 200mph through Tiger Electronics' razor-thin profit margin. BURNED!!!

[Raider @ Jan 26th 2006 2:00PM]

If any of you bothered to read the article by clicking on the link. It says it is a 2x BD drive, not a 1x burner.

Also you should read some the requirements for the movies on Blu-Ray.

"The Samsung Blu-ray burner is supposed to sell for around $500 in April. To use it to playback HD movies on your PC you need apparently at least a 3Ghz CPU and a 128MB Graphics-Card that supports that support copy protection interfaces HDMI, DVI or HDCP."

[Craig @ Jan 26th 2006 2:33PM]

Maybe I'm outta touch, but how often do you people have 20+ GB of stuff you want to burn to a write-once medium? I have a DL DVD writer at home and have needed to use an 8GB DL disc maybe all of twice in the past year. What are you folks doing that you need 25GB on a DVD? I mean, I understand that *some day* we'll have loads of HD content to tote around, but that doesn't seem to be happening very quickly.

[John P @ Jan 26th 2006 2:58PM]

Ditto Craig...
Oh and �640K ought to be enough for anybody.�

[josh @ Jan 26th 2006 3:24PM]

"15. so if this is 1x burner, are we still in the real world test rabbit environment and they already call it a usable product ? Getting tired of this v1.0 releases. If it already takes them ages to get this stuff ready why not wait another 6 months till it is 8x or more and release it then. "

they rushed this so blu ray will have an advantage over the HD-DVD in the computing sector. the more blu-ray players out the more leverage the consortium that created this standard will have with movie studios to make this the next generation home video format.

[Rodger Donaldson @ Jan 26th 2006 4:00PM]

Craig, I write ~20 GB of personal data to tape every night as my home server backup. That doesn't include my ripped CDs or anything of that ilk: it's photos, writing, and the like. Plenty of people could fill a 25GB disc, easy.

The people complainging about speed should note that a DDS5 cartridge will take 2 - 3 hours to dump a similar volume of data.

[WhyNot @ Jan 26th 2006 4:14PM]

I may be just in a fog right now, but didn't Toshiba also release their burner (or sale date)? I'm pretty certain they've already released the sale date for the player and it was stand alone at like $500. I could be wrong though.

[Mike M @ Jan 26th 2006 5:09PM]

Wow, I can't believe how many people in these comments have no idea what they're talking about. It's a first generation burner and you're complaining about time. Same thing with the price, what do you think first pc burners came out as $90?

[Galley @ Jan 26th 2006 9:06PM]

Audio CDs should never be burned faster than 24x (and preferably no more than 12x). Older CD players can have problems with the reflectivity of the discs, making them hard, or impossible to read.

[Extinction @ Jan 27th 2006 1:17PM]

"43 Minutes for 25 GB , hello are we in stoneage ? "

How long does it to take 7 single layered DVDs? 3 dual layered DVDs? Then there's the advantage of no disc swapping, and you only have to make one image instead of 7 or 3

[zbeasyt @ Jan 27th 2006 1:53PM]

$500 is a good release price.
6 months after release it will be down to $200.00
The media costs will be the killer.
I'll just wait till media costs come down.

At 50gigs.I could put all my mp3's on once cd.
At 50gigs I could put a season of a tv show on one cd.
The DRM is the only thing that worrys me.
I hope that it's not imposed on the users.
DRM is not a feature its a bug.

[Cosmic @ Jan 27th 2006 3:01PM]

After doing the math, the data rate for record comes out to be 9.6 to 9.7 MB/s (remember bytes not bits).

The wikipedia article quotes BlueRay's 1x read speed to be 36Mbits/s or about 4.5 MB/s

So this BlueRay drive records at 2x.

Also, it's interesting to note that the wikipedia quotes a 2x read speed for a BD-Rom being 108 Mbits/s. Where the authors of the original document not reading from BD-ROM?

[Cosmic @ Jan 27th 2006 3:30PM]

A 1X DVD is stated by wikipedia to have the speed of 1352 KB/s.

So a 12x DVD would be a bit greater than 16 MB/s
And if you in a habit of doing so, you could say that 1 BluRay disc speed is about the same as 3 (well, 3 and a third) DVD speeds

[Dave @ Jan 27th 2006 3:39PM]

It says in the article that it writes at 2x! Did anyone actually read it?

[Steve D @ Jan 27th 2006 3:42PM]

I paid $400 for my first 4X CD Burner... A sweet Yamaha... $500, not bad, if there is a need...

[Texaszman @ Jan 27th 2006 3:53PM]

LOL - I just threw out my first NEC CD-ROM Drive - 1X that cost me %565 new. It was kept around as a conversation piece.

[Sonic84 @ Jan 27th 2006 4:57PM]

so I guess with blu-ray on the way DVD-DL was a wast of time?

[Phaid @ Jan 27th 2006 6:29PM]

"most videophiles" recommend buying $150 Monster Cable for HDMI too. Unless you buy cheap media, there is no reason to ever burn at a lower speed than the media is rated for.

[cmo @ Jan 27th 2006 11:22PM]

There are many people who would use the space provided by Blue ray. I have over 100 gigs of music ripped to my hard drive. I'd rather back these up to 4 BlueRay Discs than 25 dvd-rs. Also, I record HD movies to my hard drive. HD movies can be from 8 to 20 gigs apiece. Until I have a burner they have to stay on one of my hard drives. How much is the media going to cost?

[Joe Momma @ Feb 2nd 2006 2:33AM]

At these Prices Ill Keep Buying Disposaable Hard Drives.
250 GB drives for 70 usd.
I could by 8 for 500.00.
thats 2 TB of rewritable storage and no Coasters lying around..

Just my 2 cents worth.