Blu-ray discs are now firmly entrenched as
the new standard for optical media, so how do you find the best Blu-ray drive
for your PC?
Now that high-definition media and monitors
have become the norm, installing a Blu-ray drive in your PC has gone from being
a luxury to a virtual necessity. Although some of us may feel like resisting
the introduction of yet another format to buy our favourite movies on, there's
no doubt that Blu-ray is here to stay, and that means that if you want to watch
the latest films on your computer, attaching a Blu-ray drive to it is the best
way to do so.
Putting cynicism aside for a second, there
are valid reasons for Blu-ray discs to exist as a separate entity from DVDs.
Crucially, because Blu-ray discs can typically store up to 50GB of data,
they're the only way you can reasonably view films in high-definition 3D, and
they're the easiest way to get high-definition films onto your computer - at
least until download speeds catch up. Indeed, it probably won't be too long
before the plummeting cost of Blu-ray discs makes regular DVD releases entirely
obsolete.
However, that's not all you can use Blu-ray
drives for. As with DVDs and CDs before them, their high capacity and low size
makes them an excellent medium for data storage. You can buy some retail
software on Blu-ray, but a far more popular way to use Blu-ray discs for data
is in the form of recordable media.
The appearance of recordable Blu-rays was
initially marked by high prices for equipment and media, but recently both have
dropped to affordable levels. With their ultra-high storage capacity,
recordable Blu-ray discs could well prove a reasonable archival format for
datasets that would otherwise be too large for a single DVD, and for that
reason it's worth looking into.
So what's the difference between a good
Blu-ray drive and a bad one? What features should you look for? And what
manufacturers are worth paying attention to? The answers to all these questions
and more will be revealed in this guide.
How Much Should You Spend?
At the moment, the average price for an
internal Blu-ray drive is in the region of $80, and you can expect to pay no
more than $16-$40 extra for one with the ability to write and rewrite to
Blu-ray discs as well. For that reason, we suggest that you budget in the
region of $120 when looking for a recordable Blu-ray drive, and around $88 when
looking for a standard Blu-ray reader with no recording capabilities.
How
Much Should You Spend?
It's possible to buy drives that are
substantially cheaper than $80. Sony, for example, produces an internal Blu-ray
writer that costs only $56, but this is a slimline product designed for laptops
and therefore doesn't perform well compared to standard desktop models. Although
you can expect Blu-ray performance that is comparable to full-price models,
such drives compromise their performance on CDs and DVDs. Unless you're only
planning to use Blu-ray discs, it's worth spending the extra money on a
full-size drive if you're buying for a desktop machine!
In terms of the media itself, you can buy
good-quality dual-layer Blu-ray recordable discs for as little as 60p each,
meaning 500GB of storage will cost only $9.6 - vastly lower than the price of
500GB if you're talking about a hard drive or solid-state format! Rewritable
Blu-ray media is also available at the cost of $4.8-$6.4 a disc, but the low
price ofwrite-once media probably makes them a poor choice in anything other
than very specific situations.
What Make/Model/Manufacturer Should You Look For?
Thinking about brands to actively look for,
Pioneer, Lite-On and LG have consistently made top-quality optical drives at
reasonable prices for a decade at least. The Pioneer BDR-207EBK, for example,
is one of a few models that support BD-XL discs, but it is priced at the top of
our recommended range. By comparison, the Pioneer BDR-207DBK is much cheaper
and fulfils all of the technical criteria you'd want out of a Blu-ray recorder.
If you're only interested in a Blu-ray
reader, the LiteOn IHES112-115 is a capable budget model that has support for
the major Blu-ray formats and a small form factor to maximise the available
space inside your PC - it's only 17cm long, which isn't that much bigger than
the discs themselves!
Note that big-name brands like Samsung and
Sony tend to be more expensive than others, but in the case of Blu-ray drives
there's little, if any benefit to spending top amounts. External drives from
these manufacturers may look more stylish, but performance sees no obvious benefits.
What Technology Should You Look For?
Whether you're buying an internal or
external Blu-ray drive, it's important to check the support for various disc
formats. As with DVDs, Blu-ray discs come in a variety of standards and
configurations, so be clear about what the drive supports before you pay.
For reference, Blu-ray Recordable discs
(BD-R) hold 25GB per layer, so support for dual-layer BD-R Discs will give you
the ability to store up to 50GB on one disc. The latest iteration of the
format, called BD-XL, can support tripe and quadruple layers allowing up to
100GB and 128GB to be stored respectively - but in order to burn these sizes
your device will require specific support on the hardware level, so unless it's
stated on the box, assume it isn't available.
For
reference, Blu-ray Recordable discs (BD-R) hold 25GB per layer, so support for
dual-layer BD-R Discs will give you the ability to store up to 50GB on one
disc.
As with CD and DVD drives, the speed of
Blu-ray discs is given as a multiple of a single speed transfer rate. For
Blu-ray discs, 1x speed means that it can copy 4.5MB a second either to or from
the disc. This means that writing or reading from one 25GB layer will just
under 95 minutes (assuming a constant transfer rate). Of course, no current
drive runs that slowly by default, and most current Blu-ray drives read at 12x
speed and write at a maximum of 6x speed.
There are two main kinds of Blu-ray drive
that you might want to buy. Internal ones fit inside your PC and take advantage
of being more compact and quieter and have generally faster transfer rates.
External ones are a little slower, but are also portable and may even have
stand-alone capabilities, meaning you can plug them directly into a TV without
the need to connect them to a computer. They can also be used with notebook PCs
which may lack a built-in optical drive.
You may also see Blu-ray writers
advertising 'LightScribe' technology. This has little to do with the Blu-ray
format itself, and is actually a system that allows optical drives to etch
labels into the surface of optical discs that have a supported coating.
Essentially, they save you having to get a sharpie out after the disc has
finished being burnt. You'll find the technology in units from several
manufacturers, but it's far from essential.
Is Now The Right Time To Buy?
The recent swathe of natural disasters in
East Asia does mean that the price of hard drive and solid-state memory has
bounced a little even as optical drives have continued to drop, so in one sense
Blu-ray drives are in a good place when considered against the alternatives in
relative financial terms. That said, it's only a small benefit, and one likely
to be offset when you consider that the price of optical drives tends to do
nothing but drop until the format is superseded by another. The longer you
wait, the cheaper it's going to be.
Is
Now The Right Time To Buy?
For example, DVD drives once cost several
times the price of a CD drive, but now you can pick one up for as little as
$24, and it's financially unviable to sell CD-ROM drives alone. Rather than
worrying about market forces, the right time to buy a Blu-ray drive is the
moment you want to actually view a Blu-ray disc. Any earlier and you could be
cheating yourself out of a price drop!
One question that is worth asking is how
often you expect to actually view Blu-ray discs at all. There's a fair chance
that the constantly improving download speeds of modern telecommunications
architecture will mean that within the next few years, it'll be possible to
download high-definition movies - maybe even 3D movies - at speeds fast enough
that they're effectively on-demand. If you're planning to use a Blu-ray drive
for data, there's definitely a place for it in the longer term, but if you're
thinking of using your drive for media alone, be aware that it may be out of
date in a couple of years. The longer you wait before buying one, the more
probable it is to become obsolete before you've had your money's worth!
What Are The Technical Constraints?
Be careful if you're buying an external
Blu-ray drive. The speed of USB ports may limit the speed of your drive, as USB
2.0 can only cope with transfer rates equivalent to 8x read speed, meaning you
won't be able to copy data any faster than that regardless of the speed of the
drive. If your computer and drive both support USB 3.0 connections, however,
the speeds are enough to cope with the fastest external Blu-ray drives, at
least for now. If you buy an internal Blu-ray drive with a SATA connector,
there is no need to worry about connection bottlenecks of this kind, because
SATA is much quicker than even the top speeds DVD drives are able reach at the
moment.
As with all internal components, there is a
power requirement for internal Blu-ray drives that may be an issue if your PC
has no extra capacity left, but this is incredibly unlikely to affect most
users. Even the most powerful Blu-ray drive takes up a small fraction of the
power a graphics card or CPU requires, so unless you know your PC is already
operating at capacity, you shouldn't expect any difficulties in this regard.
If you're buying a Blu-ray drive with the
intention of using it to watch movies, remember that your system will need
additional components in order to display them at their highest quality.
Obviously, you need a monitor with a resolution of at least 1920x1080 in order
to view HD movies in their full resolution, but the copy protection on Blu-ray
discs means that you can only watch their content in high definition if your
monitor and PC are connected through a digitally protected cable (or wireless
connection). In practical terms, this means that to watch a movie in
high-definition using a Blu-ray drive, you need to have an HDMI, DisplayPort,
or some other HDCP (High-Definition Copy Protection) compliant connection.
Although some DVI connections support HDCP, older graphics cards with DVI
connectors may lack the required technology, so check with your manufacturer if
you're unsure.
If you're forced to use VGA or some other
non-HDCP compliant connection, this doesn't mean you can't watch the movie at
all. You can still watch the content on Blu-ray discs, but it will be limited
to 720p instead of 1080p - a lower resolution designed to discourage piracy of
high definition content over analogue connections.
And, of course, the final technical
constraint worth mentioning is that you can't watch 3D movies without a 3D
monitor and glasses, so if your plans for a Blu-ray drive include 3D movies,
you'll need to buy the necessary accessories.
What's The Alternative?
Although there's no direct alternative to
installing a Blu-ray drive in your PC, there are different ways to achieve the
same results (depending on what purpose you actually bought it for).
If you want to watch high-definition movies
on your computer, it's possible to download them from legitimate sources. 1080p
content is available on iTunes, for example, and can even be streamed from
YouTube. At present there is no legal alternative for getting hold of 3D
movies, though, because either their file size or licensing restrictions (or a
combination of both) means you're unable to download them from any major
digital media retailer.
If
you want to watch high-definition movies on your computer, it's possible to
download them from legitimate sources
If, however, you want a Blu-ray drive to
create high-capacity backups, a cheap external hard drive should be able to
handle as much data as several Blu-ray discs and has the added bonus of being
easily accessible and more resistant to damage. It will, however, cost a little
more in the short term and mean you have to delete old backups once the drive
is full, so if you're interested in making long-term backups you may end up
with an inadequate solution.
Finally, if you just want to watch HD and
3D movies and don't mind whether they're on your PC or not, you could always
just buy a stand-alone Blu-ray player. Obviously, you won't be able to get data
from them onto your PC, but you should be able to attach one to your monitor
even if you don't have a high-resolution TV, so it's worth considering for that
reason alone. Many stand-alone Blu-ray players can even be connected to the
internet to download firmware updates and extra content, so you lose out on
very little in the long run!
