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Sony off-shoot unveils 'cheaper' Blu-ray drive for laptops

BD burner for desktops too

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Updated Optiarc, the optical drive joint venture between Sony and NEC, has taken the wraps off its first Blu-ray Disc playback drive for laptops, claiming the machine will allow notebook makers to equip mid-range models with the next-gen disc format.

Optiarc BC-5500A
Optiarc's BC-5500A: Blu-ray playback for laptops

Optiarc's BC-5500A doubles up as a standard CD and DVD burner, writing single-layer DVD±R/RW, dual-layer DVD±R, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW media at up to 8x, 4x, 5x and 16x speeds, respectively.

Sony NEC Optiarc BWU-200S
Optiarc's BWU-200S: 4x BD-R burning for desktops

Optiarc said the drive is available to buy now and that it will retail for around £165 ($335/€238) inc VAT.

Separately, Sony also introduced a new desktop BD drive, the BWU-200S. This one can burn BD-R and BD-RE media too, with BD-R recording speed running at 4x - though only 2x for BD-RE.

The drive is due to go on sale in the US in November for around $600.

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Latest Comments

Re: Irony Alert

"How many people have legal mp3 collections that need 25Gb storage?"

Me, and possibly quite a few others.

The music collection currently stands at 170Gb before accounting for the stuff I compose myself, which is generally stored in WAV format prior to (re)mixing and mastering. Probably looking at somewhere nearer 200Gb once this is taken into consideration.

Backup is enough of a nightmare as it is - I'd dearly love to get all of my master files onto a single disc for archival purposes but then again, Sony's involvement in Blu-ray is enough to make me not want to touch it with a shitty stick. I really miss my DAT drive ...

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RE: Irony alert

<<Perhaps someone who has gone loopy with the home movie camera? >>

You can buy HD camcorders. Obviously the file sizes are much larger than from the older camcorders.

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re: irony alert

My legal music collection is well over 25GB, around 150GB I believe, because its not stored in 128kbs mp3, its store on my PC in 1000kbs+ lossless files (and on the original CDs).

The idea of being able to back-up my entire CD collection (300 or so disks), in lossless formats, on a couple of disks, is quite appealing, actually.

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