HD optical disc burners at Computex

Adding to the growing list of Blu-ray burners we've seen so far from Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, and BenQ is a new unit from ASUS that was being shown off at Computex. This BD-R/RE/ROM burner, whose model number remains a mystery, is capable of writing to Blu-ray discs at two times speed, while burning to standard dual-layer DVD+R and DVD-R platters is accomplished at 2.4x and 2.0x speeds, respectively. Also on display was one of the first HD-DVD-R units we've seen, the 12.7-millimeter thick SD-L902A from Toshiba, which appears to burn data at what we're hoping is just a first-gen speed of 1.0x. As with many products introduced at the Taiwanese trade show, pricing and release plans for both of these burners are still up in the air.

[Via HDBeat]

[shmengie Posted Jun 13th 2006 4:10PM]

i know i'm being very short-sighted and not "embracing the future," but all this blu-ray/hd stuff is really starting to bore me. think i'll take a nap until there's a winner...

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 13th 2006 5:22PM]

looks like Blu-ray is on the right path with a lot more people suporting it.

[tinytom Posted Jun 13th 2006 5:39PM]

I really hope / think neither of these will take off. What with the price and capacity of alternatives, such as memory cards improving all the time, I don't think it will be long until companies start selling things on memory cards. Hmmm actually it may be a while, considering the cheapness of dvds (I hate it when i contradict myself). But if this is the "next generation" of removable media, then i really can't see there being another one. When Wi-max kicks in, people will be streaming everything and direct downloads will replace any type of removable media. In my eyes it can't come soon enough! $1000 for a blu-ray burner/player thing? WTF!?

[RunnyRiver Posted Jun 13th 2006 10:39PM]

I have mixed feelings about all this HD disc stuff.

When I first read the article, I thought:

Wow, HD DVD got to market sooner, but Blu Ray is burning sooner, and HD DVD would be useless to me if I couldn't burn to it.

But then it occured to me that to burn so much information--half my hard drive--on to a disc at 1 or 2x speed could take hours. So what do I do with my computer for several hours? Not much if the cd/dvd/bd or hddvd drive is occupied. So I'd have to own a desktop. And it would need a lot of RAM and I mighty fine processor to run the burner program and whatever else I was running. It would probably also need a really fast hard drive to find solitaire.exe file while reading/writing over 20 GB of data.

I guess I'm not ready for HD.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 14th 2006 8:35AM]

I know the BD drives have been listing for ~$1000, but I have not seen one published report on a PC HD-DVD writer drive's cost. ANyone know of any published pricing?