Market presence
Initially, the SH-B123 was due to hit the market shelves in July, but the official release was pushed back. While it seems to have a rather patchy existence on Samsung’s web pages, this BD-Rom drive is certainly in evidence to buy on-line at considerably less than the list price.
Blu-ray upgrade time?
Verdict
While tests suggest this BD-Rom doesn't deliver on the claimed Blu-ray read speeds, it's certainly a niftier drive than most. Overall, Samsung’s SH-B123 is an all-round decent upgrade, ably assisted by the Cyberlink bundle, and is worth shopping around for. Oh, and if you want Lightscribe, just make sure you get the SH-B123L not the SH-B123A. ®
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Samsung SH-B123 internal 12x BD-Rom drive
COMMENTS
My thoughts exactly
This is a pointless comparison.
Also what's this comment about the pioneer drive producing a sharper image? It's not qualified in any way. A different drive isn't going to have this affect as the mpeg decoding and image rendering is taken care of by the playback software and/or the graphics card.
What you seem to be comparing is one DVD package vs another.
Finally, up-scaling. If you watch a DVD on your computer or on an HD TV, it has been up-scaled. Sometimes this up-scaling is done by your DVD player, sometimes it is done by the TV and sometimes it is done by software either in this case the DVD player software, or in other cases by windows. In all cases it is up-scaled since it started off at 720x576 and ended up at some higher resolution.
Beware!
Maybe my two points are connected, but whatever :)
Firstly, £90? I have recently built a new media center PC and the BR drive cos £30, with bundled PowerDVD.
However, that particular version of PowerDVD was intentionally crippled (2 channel audio), and the latest version is actually 10, so even this Samsung drive has an old version, most probably tied to the drive as well.
Cyberlink do provide a trial, so you can see if the latest version does what you want on your hardware, but there are about 4 or 5 versions, all with varying degrees of crippledness. The 'best' version is £80! At these prices, most might as well just buy a standalone...
(With the digital nature of BR, I do not understand why the software is £80 and why it needs so much bloat. Simply render the 1080p image 1:1 on my screen, send the audio bitstream to the amp, job done.)
Screenshot WTF?
With the Private Ryan image, you're taking an image where the left half of the shot is unfocused, and then asking us to make some kind of comparison between the standard-res, UNFOCUSED left and the upscaled IN-FOCUS right?
What is this bullshit?
You shouldn't have had to pay a restocking fee.
The item was not "sold as advertised" - therefore breaking the Sale of Goods act.
Totally Dissapointed
I got this drive a couple weeks back from Newegg to speed up reads, already having two older 8X BD-ROM's. The read speed was slower than either of the 8X readers even after the latest firmware update. I returned the drive and even paid the restocking fee as I would rather put the money towards another reader like one of the two I have. Hopefully there will be more faster readers coming out soon that work better.
