Wednesday, September 22nd 2010
Sony Optiarc America Rolls Out Slim External Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Drive
Sony Optiarc America today announced its first slim, portable and external Blu-ray Disc (BD) rewritable drive to compliment notebooks, netbooks or desktop PCs. The new BDX-S500U model writes single BD-R media at up to 6X and dual layer BD-R media at up to 4X speeds, recording a full 25GB disc in about 20 minutes. The 6X recording speed is achieved using 6X compatible BD-R media, and one 25GB Sony BD-R blank disc comes included in the retail box. Also included with the drive is CyberLink's Media Suite 8 for capturing, authoring, editing, backing up, viewing high-definition personal content and playing back Blu-ray Disc movies including 3D Blu-ray movies.
The portable drive offers quick and easy connectivity with a high speed USB (USB 2.0) digital interface for simple setup and maximum flexibility. It can be shared between computers for personal video, data, music or image backup, making it an excellent replacement drive for a standard DVD drive while offering all the benefits of Blu-ray Disc technology, including 3D Blu-ray high-definition playback capabilities.
The BDX-S500U drive can record up to 50GB of data for random access storage and backup on BD-R (write once) or BD-RE (rewritable) discs, or up to 220 minutes of high-definition 24M bps MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video on a BD-R/RE 50GB disc.
The drive also records standard 4.7GB DVD+/-R discs at up to 8X speeds, 8.5GB DVD+/-R Double/Dual layer at up to 4X, DVD+RW at up to 8X, DVD-RW at up to 6X, CD-R at up to 24X, CD-RW at up to 16X, and supports DVD-RAM recording at up to 5X speeds.
Availability
The BDX-S500U drive will be available through authorized distributors, resellers and select online sites starting this month.
The BDX-S500U drive can record up to 50GB of data for random access storage and backup on BD-R (write once) or BD-RE (rewritable) discs, or up to 220 minutes of high-definition 24M bps MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video on a BD-R/RE 50GB disc.
The drive also records standard 4.7GB DVD+/-R discs at up to 8X speeds, 8.5GB DVD+/-R Double/Dual layer at up to 4X, DVD+RW at up to 8X, DVD-RW at up to 6X, CD-R at up to 24X, CD-RW at up to 16X, and supports DVD-RAM recording at up to 5X speeds.
Availability
The BDX-S500U drive will be available through authorized distributors, resellers and select online sites starting this month.
15 Comments on Sony Optiarc America Rolls Out Slim External Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Drive
I, in my part of the world, have never even physically seen a BD (other than PS3 games) yet!:shadedshu
I could see a HTPC making use of this though - you can store over hundreds of movies n music on just 1 disc. but im more likely to just add in a NAS or centralised server which hosts all my music n videos and stream it via wi-fi or hardwired connection.
Not to mention, to get the best picture quality, you lose the HD audio.
And going from HD audio to plain old AC3 is just as bad as over compressing the picture. It results in an unacceptable loss in quality and detail, except now on the audio side. Half the reason I went BD is for the higher quality audio.
With some exceptions, that include upscaled master material (usually older TV shows or anime), low detail master material(also usually older shows and anime), or poorly done studio encoding(lots of these out there. Way of War comes to mind immediately. Way too much artificial film grain), no BD looks and sounds nearly as nice compressed down to 9GB or less for 1080p. It results in a significant loss of detail. 720p is a much better way to go if you insist on squeezing a BD down to a DVD. You retain a ton more detail.
People are fooled, only because most of the time they haven't seen the original source, and it does still look much better than DVD. It retains it's sharpness at high resolution, which does make it look pretty good, but if you compare it to the original, you'll see that a bunch of detail is gone.
@ inferKNOX : where are you live ? its plenty BD movie in here even on small store that usually sell dvd film. and gradually the price is down now, you can buy BD movie around $15
And for me, 15 blank single layer BD's of good quality cost $20, and 20 DL DVDs of good quality cost the same. The single layer BD's result in less coasters, so the price difference is negligible.
This is especially true when you consider that for:
BD 15*25GB=375GB or 18.75GB per $1 or 5 1/3 cents per GB
DL DVD 20*8.5=170GB or 8.5GB per $1 or 11.7 cents per GB
DL DVD is actually over 2x more expensive per GB than single layer BD.
I will say, however, DL BD is absolutely useless for movies. You can't see or hear a difference. it's just excessive bitrate at that point, unless you have a 4 hour long movie.