Samsung Blu-ray burner out in May

[Marwin]

Samsung Blu-ray burner out in May

Samsung will have a Blu-ray read-write drive on the market as early as mid-May for a wholesale price of around $600 (£340 approx), the company revealed today. The drive will be 'triple write', which means it will also burn CD and DVD disks.

The price is just $100 more than that of Toshiba's first high-definition player using rival HD-DVD technology – and that cannot burn disks.

The Samsung announcement came as a surprise as at Cebit the company said it would launch its first Blu-ray player on 24 May, to coincide with the release of the first Blu-ray movie titles, and that a burner would not be available until later this year.

There has also been speculation about copy-protection problems, after Sony cited Blu-ray troubles as a reason for postponing its Playstation 3 launch.

But Chas Kalsi, European technical manager for optical media solutions, said today: 'We have developed a chip implanting AACS [Advanced Access Content System – the digital-rights system adopted by both HD camps]. My understanding is that production of drives will start in the first week of May and that they should be available in Europe a week later.'

The first drives will have a 2X Blu-ray burn speed, with a transfer rate of 9Mbits/sec and have an IDE interface. 'I am trying to persuade them to offer a serial ATA interface,' Kalsi said. A USB external drive will follow shortly.

A triple-write 4X drive, and a slimline 2X model for laptops, are planned for early next year with a 4X slimline in the second half of 2007.

Kalsi said the release of multi-layer drives depended on the availability of media and he understood that Verbatim would have quad-layer disks capable of holding 100GB by early next year.

The new drives will require high-end PCs, with dual-core processors and a graphics card capable of supporting HD resolutions and High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), the digital-rights system for DVI and HDMI interfaces.

Blu-ray discs are expected to cost around €15 (£10 approx) single layer and twice as much for dual.

Interesting to hear that Verbatim is working on 100GB qual-layer discs as well, only heard about TDK before

[thunderhawk]

Great. A 4x BD is 144 Mbps. A 16 DVD drive goes up to 177.28 Mbps. Blu-ray Disc is coming close.

[marzetta7]

I saw this news elsewhere and I have to say this is awesome. A triplewriter for only $600! Not to mention the info about the availability of 100GB discs by next year. I can see many flocking to the Blu-ray format for the opportunity of TV sitcoms in HD and from a disc consolidation perspective alone. This year will be interesting indeed.

[thunderhawk]

Oh yes.
2006 -> launch of many new technologies
2007 -> new technologies to become mainstream
At least, I hope

[Marwin]

Blu-ray Writers Reach Last Hurdle

Blu-ray recordable drives for desktop PCs are almost ready to ship but still need some bugs ironing out, according to early tests carried out by IT Week labs. The standard, designed to supersede DVDs, enables users to store up to 25GB of files on a single-layer Blu-ray disk.

We looked at an engineering sample of Samsung's BD-Writer, which is set to ship in late April. Although we were able to write and verify files using Nero Express 7 authoring software with beta support for Blu-ray, our test system was unable to read the disks using Windows Explorer. Samsung said this was likely due to issues with the beta support in Nero.

Our tests used rewritable BD-RE media supplied by TDK, and we were able to write a 12GB file set in 23 minutes, which rates the drive with a write speed of about 8.7MB/s.

Samsung's BD-Writer will support triple-write capability when it ships, meaning the drive can record to CD and DVD media as well as Blu-ray disks. Pioneer's BDR-101A drive, which is now expected late in April, will only be backwards compatible with DVD media initially.

Chas Kalsi, European technical manager at Samsung, said his firm hopes to support dual-layer writing in production models from the outset. This would double storage capacity to 50GB with compatible Blu-ray media. The drive firmware can also be upgraded via Samsung's LiveUpdate web service to add this capability at a later date.

The BD-Writer is expected to cost about £350, according to Samsung.

This sounds great, either the BD writer will support dual-layer BD recording from the start, or it will be firmware upgradeable to support it.