Samsung SH-BO83L
Combo upgrade time?
Review For those using their PCs as home entertainment centres, the Samsung SH-BO83L internal drive turns your computer into a versatile Blu-ray player while also acting as a fast DVD and CD writer. In one step, it upgrades your disc burning ability and adds BD-Rom support at a thoroughly reasonable price.
Samsung’s SH-BO83L: Sata desktops need only apply
Installation is easy: the product slots into any free 5.25in drive bay in your desktop PC and can be fixed manually with the mounting screws provided. It is a Serial ATA device, so requires an appropriate Sata connector on your motherboard and a Sata plug leading from your computer's power supply. A Sata data cable is provided in the box along with the drive.
The drive fascia is designed in the popular colour of the hour – glossy black – with a mirrored finish given to the flap covering the tray. The large, L-shaped eject button also acts as the drive's data access light, flashing a bright blue probably to suggest 'Blu-ray' or possibly to remind you not to burn pirate discs or the police will be on to you.
The specifications of the unit are good, promising 8x read speed of single-layer BD-ROM discs (including BD-R and BD-RE) and 4x for dual-layer media. For DVDs, playback is rated at 16x while you should be able to write DVD+/-R discs at 16x, DVD+RW at 8x and DVD-RW at 6x. You can write CD-R media at 48x and CD-RW at 32x. Read speed for standard CD-ROMs is 48x, reduced a little to 40x for CD-R and CD-RW discs.
Boring all that might be, it simply means you can burn and play DVD and CD media at the industry's best mainstream desktop speeds as well as play Blu-ray movies and access data from BD-ROMs. This kind of product would have cost £150 just a few months ago, so the price has effectively halved.
Bundled with Cyberlink software for Blu-ray playback and CD/DVD disc authoring
Also provided in the box is a copy of Cyberlink's Blu-ray Disc Suite 6.0, a generous package of disc utilities. As well as the essential PowerDVD 8 for playing Blu-ray and DVD movies, the suite includes PowerProducer – a friendly DVD creator for compiling your own camcorder videos, an 'open-session' utility for convenient CD writing (InstantBurn) and disc label designer (LabelPrint), plus backup software.
COMMENTS
wake me up when its cheaper
Sorry a great price would be about £30 ,after all they must be cranking those bluray diodes out by the gazillions by now.
60 Quid 2008 ??
"It's 20 quid more than the Pioneer BD-ROM I bought 2 years ago, and offers no more functionality."..............If there had been any £59.99 PC internal blue ray drives 2 years ago Im sure El Reg would have reviewed them. But there wasn't.
You might have given your knee jerk...
anecdotal post a little more credit if you'd spelt 'BlueRay' correctly. Let me guess... shoe horned Blu-Ray into an old entertainment setup and it couldn't cope and rather than invest to get it all working properly, as many people quietly realised they had to, you thought getting all bitter and narky about it like a petulant child.
I bet you think Sony invented BlueRay as well don't you?
E-Mails for downloads
This is why I always enter bogus emails in order to download. There's no reason to give it out in order to download a driver that will make the product I bought work correctly. It's not to determine what was wrong with the product, but to send advertisements. I get a minimum of b.s. in my acct. and I'd like to keep it that way.
Great Price?
It's 20 quid more than the Pioneer BD-ROM I bought 2 years ago, and offers no more functionality.
These drives should be under £40 by now.
PowerDVD 8 doesn't support bitstream audio passthrough, effectively crippling the audio.
For 80+ quid I expect *alot* more than this package offers.
