PLDS iHES208 Blu-ray drive
More than just an interim enhancement?
Review PLDS is a joint venture between Philips and Lite-On that develops optical disc drive technologies and markets related products. The PLDS iHES208 internal drive is new take on the 'combo' drive concept, providing complete CD and DVD reading and writing functions, plus the ability to play Blu-ray titles at full 1080p quality. Indeed, its Blu-ray functionality makes it a tempting upgrade for your PC’s existing internal CD/DVD writer, while possibly also improving your disc writing speeds too.
Joint effort: the PLDS iHES208 is a combo of manufacturers as well as optical media
As a Sata drive, the iHES208 is relatively simple to instal, especially if you are replacing an existing CD drive. If you want to instal it as a second drive, you will need a spare CD drive bay, a spare power supply plug-and-cables, and a free Sata port on your motherboard. Whatever you do, make sure your motherboard provides Sata support, since you will not be able to fit this product in legacy PCs. It is also worth noting that the iHES208 is a Windows-only product.
The drive reads single-layer Blu-ray discs at 8x and dual layer at 4x. It can write to DVD+R and DVD-R discs at 16x, and to rewritable DVD media at between 6x and 8x. It is a 16x reader for all types of DVD. The iHES208 is also a 48x CD-ROM reader, 48x CD-R writer and 32x CD-RW rewriter.
After installing the hardware, we found that the iHES208 could operate as a regular CD writer straight away without adding any software. For full rewriter and Blu-ray support, however, you will need to install the CyberLink Blu-ray Disc Suite provided. This is a rather long installation, unfortunately, and no sooner had we launched the program for the first time than it prompted us to download a newer version and do it all again.
The supplied Cyberlink software is very effective and leaves little to complain about
The trouble was worth taking as we found the iHES208 to be a fast, reliable and (most importantly) quiet drive in operation. The last-mentioned makes it ideal as a movie player on a home computer since you are going to be sitting a mere couple of feet away from the drive while the player is running. Equally, if your PC hardware can support it, the drive and its bundled software correctly delivery a variety of multi-channel audio options as offered by the Blu-ray or DVD title itself.
COMMENTS
Stereo powerdvd?
If the bundle is the same as everywhere else, the powerdvd is stereo-only, which is pretty much useless for HTPC.
BD writing sounds cool but as long as the media costs like 5€/pop, it's just not worth it. And the time the prices come to around 1€/disc, these writers are real dinosaurs.
not such good value
equivelent LG is only £80 and LG with Blue ray writing is only £148, so this isn't such great value
Windows only?
I presume you mean the software is Windows only?
Technically the drive will still function on Linux as a DVD-RW drive for playback and recording of DVDs and reading of Bluray discs. Actually it's also possible with Nero for Linux to also burn Blu-Ray media. The only thing missing from Linux at the moment is on the fly Blu-ray playback (although it is possible to rip a BD movie and play it back).
Rob
LG
I picked up an LG GGCH20L Blu-ray combo drive from PC World for about £80, which reads everything (including HD-DVD) and writes to everything except Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
Seems like a better deal than this drive, unless this drive also writes to Blu-ray, though the Blu-ray writer version of the LG drive (GGWH20L) is only about £125.
Overpriced nonsense
£110 for a BD reader? For an extra 20 quid, why not just splurge on an LG BH08LS20 and let you write as well? OK, it won't give you Lightscribe, but is that really a killer feature?
Fair enough that it's SATA only though. In my experience, any rig that didn't have SATA connectors probably wouldn't be up to the job of displaying 1080p anyway.
