Sony yells "me too," introduces BWU-300S 8x Blu-ray burner

What is this, the week of the 8x BD writer or something? Just days after Buffalo announced two such units for the American market (and Delkin failed epically with an alternative half as quick yet more expensive), in runs Sony with an 8x Blu-ray writer of its own. The October-bound BWU-300S can cook an entire single-layer (25GB) BD-R in around 15 minutes, and it'll also burn CDs at up to 48x and DVD-RAMs at an undisclosed rate. In an effort to push the Blu-ray playing aspects, the drive comes bundled with the BD version of Men in Black, and if all that's worth $399.99 to you, you can get your pre-order in this very moment.

[Flashpoint @ Sep 23rd 2008 10:24AM]

Blu Ray feels so old now. After HD-DVD imploded, Blu Ray really doesn't feel neccessary.

Portable HDD's are cheaper, Flash memory is getting cheaper, SSD's are getting cheaper. I thinkBlu Ray is either the last physical media we will see in a format war, if not, the second to the last.

Now that people are basically forced to consolidate their Television, phone and internet to digital, due to high prices for individual services, it shouldn't be too long before digital content delivery is the standard.

[phanbouy @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:24PM]

who needs logic when a Serious Tone is all you need?

[From My Cube @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:29PM]

I was never one to buy tons of DVD's and hord them on my shelf to show off a collection ( i may be in the minority here) but DISH Network has essentially the format killer. You can now get 1080P HD streams of 100 stations AND you have the choice of On Demand movies at 1080P for a fraction of the price it costs to 1) buy a blu-ray player 2) buy the Blu-Ray movie...

honestly, how many times do you watch those DVD's you bought for 13.99? If the answers isnt more than 3-4 times, then you lost money and should have just rented it...

[phanbouy @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:32PM]

how're those compression artifacts treatin' ya, 'Cube?

[From My Cube @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:51PM]

@ Phanbouy ...You may want to step off the "jump to conclusion matt"...I never said I have Dish Network, I am saying its available...it may not be perfect but its a start. I cant wait for the day that all tv stations on Time Warner Cable (the death of me!!!!) will be in 1080P...but Dish set the standard and its now time for the others to follow

hell...let me knock out of the few crap ass channels...Hope shopping network, oxygen, womens entertainment and ill free up some bandwith to the connection at my house

[AL @ Sep 23rd 2008 7:46PM]

The compression argument is similar to music - MP3 or CD? Not so long ago, the compression of MP3 was distinctively inferior to CD quality, but today the technology (as well as the availability of storage capacity) has made it so that the loss of quality in whatever format you desire is a decent trade-off to the convenience of large amounts of music via online music stores. You just have to look at the sales of CD's versus online music - the trend is there.

So, we're probably not there yet - but the technology moves on and I expect that on-demand services will grow so that the convergence of your want of quality and the delivery of sufficient quality to meet that will result in nobody buying discs anymore. Yes, it may never achieve the same quality as blu-ray (as in the argument of CD vs MP3), but the trade-off in terms of convenience will mean that most people will accept it (provided that it's cheap enough).

What I really want is for the studios to stop making crappy re-makes and start making decent original movies that I'd be willing to pay to watch.

[SimbaDogg @ Sep 23rd 2008 8:25PM]

@ Cube and flashpoint
i will never buy a movie through amazon, or buy a movie through my ps3 store if a few conditions aren't met 1) its drm free 2) you can take it and throw it on as many computers as you want w/ no expiration date 3) you have no problem redownloading the movie for free if for some reason you have a HDD crash/failure. If all three of those aren't met, you're still renting the movie...even if it feels like you bought it. And in that case, i'll roll w/ blu ray hands down anyday. oh yeah, 1080p VOD...compression FTL

[loosely_coupled @ Sep 23rd 2008 9:22PM]

ARGH! I get so sick of always having to expend the energy to refute your myopic arguments....

// "Portable HDD's are cheaper, Flash memory is getting cheaper, SSD's are getting cheaper. I thinkBlu Ray is either the last physical media we will see in a format war, if not, the second to the last. Now that people are basically forced to consolidate their Television, phone and internet to digital, due to high prices for individual services, it shouldn't be too long before digital content delivery is the standard"

Yes, at some point in the future, all media distribution will be done via internet transfer, but not anytime soon, e.g. within the next 3-5 years --- and there are many reasons for this.

1) Because of the poor state of broadband competition (or lack thereof) in this country, broadband ISPs (Mostly regional cable companies) vastly oversell their internet bandwidth. Instead of upgrading their infrastructure with next-generation technology, they are attempting to throttle or stop P2P and Bittorrent traffic, not because of copyright concerns, but because of the bandwidth usage in an age when many consumers are finally starting to use the internet for things other than email and web browsing. Many broadband providers have already expressed interest in moving away from unlimited plans and moving to capped plans. I can guarantee that the average American wanting a low-cost broadband connection will be capped at 30-75 GB per month or less. This will just not allow regular downloading of enormous 15-20GB 1080P movie files anytime soon. Even without stifling caps, I honestly don't believe that most ISPs networks could handle most of it users regularly downloading multi-gigabyte files. Think of all the reports you hear of, where P2P and bittorrent traffic accounts for a majority of internet traffic, and then think of how few users are actually utilizing all of that bandwidth. If even 25% of cable broadband users started download 15GB movies files regularly, the infrastructure would probably be overwhelmed.

2) Even with the rise of digital music and film downloads, we have continued to see a strong preference for physical media from a large subset of consumers. With the increasingly draconian DRM restrictions seen on digital feature film rentals and purchases from a variety of different mediums (PS3, Xbox, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, et al), I think this attitude will only grow stronger. The convenience of online purchasing can easily be marginalized by the INCONVENIENCE of ridiculous DRM schemes wherein people relinquish so much control over the media have purchased. Much would need to change in this area before I would consider it feasible for mass adoption. Consumers may generally be stupid and slow to react, but they eventually realize when people are taking advantage of them, and once that perception is created, it's almost impossible to remove.





like to physically have movies they own. At least that seems to be the pattern. It makes sense to me, because I as well like to have physical copies of media that I own. You don't have to worry about backup, you don't have to worry about always hogging all of your broadband bandwidth or having download caps with your ISP, and you get to take pride in having your collection visible and it also makes it easier to rummage through to find a movie.

[loosely_coupled @ Sep 23rd 2008 9:23PM]

Please ignore that last misplaced chunk of text from my post above ---> stupid comment system

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Sep 24th 2008 2:30AM]

If you look back on the history of recordable optical media, you will see a trend. When CD-R was first released circa 1996, a 1x speed CD-R disc sold for $15-20 (1996 dollars), CD-RW media sold for $30 (cost in 1996) and those prices were for one disc. When recordable DVD was introduced, media was so expensive it was kept locked in tempered glass cases away from the fingers of the public. A Single DVD+/-RW at the time of release and for the years following sold for 15-30 and DVD-/+ R cost $10 per disc at introduction and climbed down to $2 after a few years.

Fast forward to the current time in 2008 and CD-R costs around or less than 10¢ cents per disc and CD-RW media can be acquired for about .25¢. DVD media is almost as cheap as CD media. Give Blu-Ray some time for it to hit market saturation and you will see $99 12x Blu-Ray drives (eventually will cost $30) and recordable media that is about the same price as DVD+/-RW. History will repeat it's self again and again and again and again......

[AL @ Sep 24th 2008 3:43AM]

@ loosely_coupled
I'm one of those who still buys CD's over online music, but you can't refute the facts - CD sales are dropping, but online music sales are increasing. People want to buy singles, not albums anymore. The era of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin concept albums has unfortunately passed (note to musicians - bring this concept back, I will buy, singles music today sucks - Green Day did it). This refutes your claim that there is a strong presence for physical media for music - lower CD sales are proving otherwise.

DRM in its current state sucks - the media publishers have enforced some crappy technology that is buggy, intrusive and in some cases outright dangerous to the consumer. But, in the end, you have to consider that the publishers have to have some sort of method to protect themselves against pirating - after all, they are the holders of the right to publish the artist's work, and therefore by having no protection they give the pirates out there a free lunch. Right now, the DRM systems for movies is clunky because it's all so new and there are plenty of players in the market. What we need is someone to kill off the competition and bring our media delivery into 1 or 2 different methods, otherwise, we'll have all these stupid DRM formats everywhere. I don't care who does it, just give us 1 or 2 ways, that's all.

So, yes, DRM is crap and it's keeping customers at bay at the moment, but you can't tell me that you want the publishers to give the world an easy way to pirate movies so easily, because that's just dreaming of a world with no criminals. The online subscription model is probably the better option for the future - you pay a fee to have the right to watch/listen to the online catalogue of movies/music whenever you want. What I hope is that the medium for which the content is delivered is standardised to allow easy access to it. Maybe physical media will be left to the connoisseurs of movies and music, and will therefore charge a higher price for the higher quality.

As for the squeezing of bandwidth, as I said, if the trade-off on quality vs convenience hits, we may not see 20Gb movies for streaming anytime soon (who's downloading 800Mb music CD's now when you can get a full CD for less than 100Mb), and therefore telcos may be able to handle it until they upgrade their infrastructure.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Sep 24th 2008 5:17AM]

@My last comment

When CD-R/W drives were first introduced in 1995-1996, they cost over $1,000-1,500 (1996 USD) and wrote at a slow 1x speed and connected to a slow parallel port (same as printer port) on the back of the PC.

[OneLove @ Sep 24th 2008 11:30AM]

Balls wants a fatter pipe. lol

[bob sakamano @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:26PM]

you guys posted this four hours ago and retracted it during the android conference!! who else remembers?!?!?

[phanbouy @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:29PM]

probably just wanted to add the funny men in black quote

i, for one, am excited to make multiple backups of my high definition experience(TM) of Dude, Where's My Car?

[DssTrainer @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:30PM]

yes

[bob sakamano @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:33PM]

why is the dvd ram rate undisclosed? will they hold a press conference to let us know?

[DssTrainer @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:29PM]

i remember seeing this posting right in the middle of the G1 conference... then it was removed...looks like you backed it out until now.. poor sony gets the shaft.

[Laughing Man @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:39PM]

They could have at least given a free copy of a movie that came out this year.....or even last year for that matter. I mean.....Men in Black??

[Lowest Ranked @ Sep 23rd 2008 6:32PM]

Fun Fact #8:

MIB was the first DVD I ever owned. The year was 2000.

[Ian @ Sep 23rd 2008 8:18PM]

fun fact #42

that movie still kicks ass.

[timmy @ Sep 23rd 2008 3:41PM]

So does this mean regular PC Blue-ray readers will come down in price and maybe include movie software?

My next media pc project is to add a blue-ray reader and software for movies.

[BOGRASH @ Sep 23rd 2008 4:16PM]

blu-ray is dead already. what a disaster.

[phanbouy @ Sep 23rd 2008 4:30PM]

well it's still the highest spec'd optical media, which means the Porsche driving set, who can't seem to calculate the price/benefit ratio of elaborate home theatres vs actually just going out to the movies, will keep buying em

[phanbouy @ Sep 23rd 2008 4:43PM]

talkin about the HT hardware to actually notice/care about the difference from DVDs

[A1 @ Sep 23rd 2008 5:02PM]

Replace "Blu-ray" with "This comment" and your good to go.

[alexmueller @ Sep 23rd 2008 4:42PM]

So the fastest current burner is the same price or cheaper, than most stand alone home theater players,... o that makes sense.

[sam @ Sep 23rd 2008 7:25PM]

stupidly high price, bluray writers wont catch on for years until low price writers and media are available, its a shame hd-dvd died:(

[Dave Chappelle @ Sep 23rd 2008 9:21PM]

Why are people so damn persistent about downloading HD content? its CRAP!! and will not happen.

Do you think companies like Paramount, Time Warner, etc are going to put movies READY FOR PIRATING straight onto out computers?. Why do you think Sony went MiniDisc instead of flash memory? Sony BMG, perhaps?

I cant download a 40gb movie damn it. and no1 else can in Australia. our max limits are like 120gb on ADSL2+ and it costs over $120.+ Not everyone in Aus has a computer let alone intertubes, people are proud of there 256kb connections here (boasting about their broadband). Very few people here have more then 1.5mb chances of mainstream digital distribution occurring in Australia within the next 5 years 0%.. it may already be here but its defo not going to be the standard FOR A LONG LONG TIME.

8x Blu Ray burner!!!... awesome.