Lite-On announce lower 'strategic' price for internal Blu-ray drive in Europe
Lite-On has announced that, since Blu-ray lasers are no longer in short supply and the company has accumulated enough stock of the product, they are lowering the price of their internal Blu-ray PC drive – titled as the particularly uninspiring LH-2B1S.
The drive launched back in November last year, when there was a distinct shortage of components. Now, says Katrin Ackermann, European Sales Manager for Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions, “we can see already a growing demand of Blu-ray. It looks like the format is getting more popular now that there are more playback devices and movie titles available in the market. Now we have the possibility to lower our prices, to make our product available for a bigger group of customers and increase our sales quantity.”
The drives are now expected to retail for around £350, which is £60 below current average market price.
The LH-2B1S will be sold with a free SATA cable and one BD-R (write once) disc. The drive can write to Blu-ray media at 2x speed, as well as handling the usual array of standard DVD and CD media.
Lite-On is also working on an external 2x Blu-ray writer, and an internal 4x speed writer.
From their rhetoric, it may sound as if Lite-On are another company who believe that Blu-ray is fast approaching the winning post, but it should be remembered that they also manufacture HD DVD drives, as well as assembling drives for other manufacturers.
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