Coming to a PC near you: Sony's BWU-100A Blu-Ray disc drive that burns four hours of 1080i hi-def video to a single disc

The Blu-Ray bandwagon has added an extra wheel to its cart having taken a battering from the delayed launch of the PS3. Sony's first disc drive burner is the tonic intended to bolster the campaign for hi-def hearts and minds.Blu-Ray burners have already found their way into Sony Vaios but the BWU-100A will enable PC makers and owners to add the 50GB disc-swallowing drives to their own units. Aimed squarely at Media Centers or video editing set-ups, each disc will swallow and spit out up to four hours of 1080i footage. A software upgrade will be required to play commercial copy-protected movies…

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Somebody, somewhere has to get their hyperbole under control when calling this Sharp's “first” Blu-ray player. Fact is, we've already seen the Sharp BD-MPC70, BD-HD1000, BD-MPC10, BD-HP1 (hint: BD = Blu-ray Disc) devices. Now if what they mean is that it only plays Blu-ray discs (no recorder, no receiver, etc), well, why even bother? Regardless, their new BD-HP20S is expected to ship in the fall and features HDMI 1.3 output in support of Dolby TrueHD's raw bitstream form. It will also feature a “Quick Start” option which plays newly inserted discs in just seconds. As a stand-alone player, we …

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It's made by Sony, plays Blu-ray discs, is out in the US and not available here yet. No, not the PS3, but the dedicated BDP-S1 movie spinner

Take one PS3, remove all the gaming abilities and what have you got? That’s right, a Blu-ray player. So is there anything to commend Sony's first stand alone machine?Well first impressions in the States are that the picture quality is superb. It's also one of the first players to support the enhanced Blu-ray Disc Java extras (BD-J to its friends) found on titles such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - but then so do our PS3s.So will it be worth shelling out for instead of the equally elusive gamer? We'll put them side by side as soon as we get our hands on one.EssentialsSony BDP-…

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We can complain all we
want about the price or the delays or the format war in general, but it all comes down performance for people who are
actually going to be picking up Blu-ray burners like Pioneer's BDR-101A, which
seems to come out a champ in PC Word's tests at least. Write speeds are at 45 minutes to fill a single 25GB BD-R disc
at the 2X max burring speed, and while you could get that much data onto multiple single-layer DVD R discs with an 18x
burner, it gives 10X double-layer DVD R burning a run for its money. The actual throughput for the burner clocks in at
67mbps, compared to the …

Full content at: Engadget