The large electronics company LG has announced it will be releasing three new PC Blu-ray drives with a price range of $200 USD to $380 USD.
The three drives, the BE06, GBC-H20L, and GBW-H20L are the latest in a successful line from LG. The BE06 is an external model which connects through a USB 2.0 port. It is supposed to be compatible with “all” Blu-ray disc formats, as well as all CD and DVD formats. The drive however, can only write DVDs and CDs at up to 16x and 24x speeds respectively and read BD-R at 6x speed. BD-REs can stream at 2x. That drive will cost $380 USD.
The other two models are internal drives and the GBW-H20L is the only of the three that can write Blu-rays. It “has a read/write capacity of 6x for BD-R discs, and 2x for BD-RE. A 16x speed is retained for DVD+RW/-RW in both models.” The models are listed as $200 USD and $280 USD, respectively.
Result for: external model
MCE Technologies has announced it is bringing a 6x Blu-ray burner to Macs that can playback DVDs at 16x as well as read both Blu-ray and HD DVD.
The drive also has LightScribe compatibility and will allow professionals to author Blu-ray movies using Adobe Premier Pro CS3’s Encore software. Non-professionals can use Roxio’s Toast 9 Titanium (with the Toast HD/BD plug-in) to author more simple BD movies.
The bare drive is meant for Mac Pro or Power Mac G4/G5 running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and can only use the HD DVD and Blu-ray playback if using Windows XP/Vista through a Boot Camp partition.
The drive will retail for $500 USD with an external model selling for $750 USD.
According to the specs, the new “Blu-ray drive works with all DVD and CD media, and writes to both 25 GB and 50 GB BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable) Blu-ray disks. Speed specs for the new drive are 6X for 25 GB BD-R, 4X to 50 GB BD-R and 16X to DVD±R. It also burns at 4X speeds to DVD±R DL, 5X to DVD-RAM and 40X to CD-R media, among others.”
For an extra $100 USD, MCE will bundle the drive with an installation package, software for Windows Boot Camp playback of both Blu-ray and HD-DVD and Toast 9 with the plugin. For $1300 MCE will ship the drive with the Boot Camp package, Toast, and Adobe Premier Pro CS3 with Encore.
