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BenQ officially unveils Trio Writer BW1000
We've gotten a few early tradeshow looks at this but BenQ has finally made it official, putting a price of €799 ($1,022 U.S.) on their BW1000 Blu-ray burner. The drive will ship at the end of August and is equipped with three lasers to write to CDs, DVDs and BDs. It's basically the same as the Panasonic LF-MB121JD, read and writing BD-Rs and BD-REs at 2x speed. They're also touting their Precision Tilt Control System, SolidBurn and WriteRight technologies to avoid coasters. At $20 per BD-R blank, that should be very reassuring.[Via CDRinfo]
LG's 4x Blu-ray burner: GBW-H10N
Just when we were getting used to Pioneer's Blu-ray recording drive, LG has announced one that, on paper at least, blows it away. Like Pioneer's drive, it only supports burning to single-layer (25GB) Blu-ray discs, but it ups the speed from 2x to 4x for burning and playback. Also unlike the Pioneer, it will read and write to CDs. Only BD-R discs get the extra speed however, with rewritable BD-REs still limited to 2x recording. This drive is slated to hit in the summer at a cost of €799 ($1020 USD). With dual-layer (50GB) Blu-ray media slated to become available this summer, we have to wonder when we sill see a burner that can use it.
Blu-ray appreciation day: Disc production problems solved, 200GB on the way?
Ok, ok, you found me out, I'm an anti-Blu-ray subversive (actually, I'm anti spending over $300 on a movie player but that's neither here nor there). Just so everyone knows there is no bad blood between Blu-ray and HD Beat we've got some good news to report.A small company called Blue Ray Technologies claim they have solved production issues with Blu-ray disc manufacturing that have lead to as much as a 75% defect rate, and lower that to 25%, drastically cutting costs. We'd love to take these guys seriously but in light of Nintendo's Wii, wii're taking naming very seriously and adding an E to the end of the technology does not cut it. Also, if current failure rates are at 75% for disc replicators, we don't want to see anyone's face when their $47 TDK dual-layer Blu-ray BD-R makes a coaster, ouch. However if they can really help get prices down we're all for it.Also, TDK has issued a release that they have developed a prototype 200GB Blu-ray disc that uses six 33GB layers to hold data. Sounds interesting; hopefully we'll see production versions soon.See? We can say nice things about Blu-ray...even though it's not out yet and delays make us very very angry.[Via CDRinfo & Newlaunches thanks for the tip!]
