Friday, June 12th 2009
Lite-On Out With Affordable Blu Ray Drive
Optical drive specialist Lite-On is released a new Blu Ray drive, the iHOS104, which started shipping this week. At US $69.99, the drive provides reading Blu Ray discs at 4x speed, 8x for DVD-ROM, and 32x for CD-ROM. It supports reading known sub-formats of the media. The drive packs 2 MB of cache, and uses a standard SATA interface. It comes with a copy of Cyberlink TrueTheater software.
Source:
TechConnect Magazine
42 Comments on Lite-On Out With Affordable Blu Ray Drive
though i guess it was one drive and i couldve been unlucky.
sometimes things are cheap for a reason ;)
Well honestly, this is one of their first Blu-ray drives. Lite-On has been making better models, and sell the older designs at a cheaper price. This drive in particular was only $76.99, well now. This is honestly, not a big price cut for this drive. $7 is nice, but it is still just $7.
P.S. I am with you. I want a say....$30 price drop average on Blu-ray burners. And a 20% drop in the media. That would help a lot more.
Never go Liteon again.
If the movie industry wants me to buy BR movies at around $30 a pop right away, maybe they should throw in a reader. Somewhat like the printer companies. When you can buy a cheap printer for less then the price of the refills. The BR disks can't cost more then 2 to 5 bucks each, someone help me out on the wholesale price of a mass produced BR movie.
I did a little digging and this is just a DVD ROM/Blu-ray drive. I was indeed wrong. Some the Blu-Ray drives (especially the cheap ones) do only play discs.
This doesn't change my original point that Lite-On already has a Blu-ray drive for $76.99 so this is still just a small price cut. Hell, they also make a Blue-ray Drive/DVD burner w/ Lightscribe for $90. I say spend the extra $20 (if you don't already have a burner).
a modern video card aka Radeon HD or Geforce 8800 or higher for hardware decoding of blu-ray video codecs
and a Blu-Ray Playback software like Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre, CyberLink PowerDVD, or Corel WinDVD
You can still use the drive itself on other operating systems.
This drive is already for sale in AU, for $120. Its the cheapest one i can find, and its only just launched!