Sony unveils BWU-100A – their first Blu-ray Disc drive for PCs
Blu-ray in the real world gets ever closer, with Sony announcing its first PC drive for the high-capacity discs, the BWU-100A drive.
The BWU-100A reads and records single and dual layer Blu-ray Disc Recordable (BD-R) and Rewritable (BD-RE) media at 2x speed, which, as you know, offers up to 50GB capacity per disc (in real terms, that’s 12,000 MP3s or 100,000 JPEGs). In addition, the BWU-100A is also capable of playing back commercial Blu-ray movies (when they arrive). And to save you throwing out all of your old disc, it’s backward read and write compatible with all major DVD and CD formats.
The BWU-100A is also bundled with CyberLink BD Solution – a software application for capturing, authoring, editing and burning high-definition content such as personal and professional high definition camcorder footage onto BD discs. The BWU-100A is optimised for keeping the videos in the native HDV 1080i format for playback on Blu-ray Disc players or BD-ROM drives while the software can also "down-convert" high-definition videos for burning on standard DVDs.
The drive is available from next month, expect to pay around £649.
