Too soon for Blu-Ray drives?

DeaconFrost · 26 Jan 2012

I'm toying around with buying a Blu-Ray burner, and I'm looking at the LiteOn model with LightScribe. I know the Plextor gets better reviews, but the only difference is speed....not a big deal to me.

I probably wouldn't be using it for movies right away, but more for the re-writeable ability to store 25 GB on a disc. Maybe later on I'd get into ripping and converting Blu-Ray movies to stream from my WHS 2011 box to my TV/Xbox.

Do you think it is too soon to buy...as in many new models and tech are right around the corner so I should wait. Or, are they pretty much set and stable for a little, so I wouldn't have much to lose?

jumanji · 26 Jan 2012

I have two bluray burners one external (ASUS) and one internal (Liteon). Other two external BD drives (read only) are extensively used for playing bluray movies and DVD movies.

Honestly I haven't burnt any data on BDs for the last one year or so. Even with the highest speeds available these are too slow and for storing large data external HDDs are still the best option or so I think.

That said, I have burnt a few BDs with videos from my HD Camcorder. So for me it was not a waste.

DeaconFrost · 26 Jan 2012

I forgot to mention two points that you reminded me of. First, we did recently buy a Canon camcorder that's capable of shooting in full HD. Second, for backups and things like that, I'd still use my server and it's backup drive....however, my data usage for Blu-Ray would be for archival purposes...such as storing digital photos on a disc. I completely forgot about our camcorder purchase...so I think that's tipping me in favor of placing the order.

Wishmaster · 26 Jan 2012

If your interested in one I say go for it.

I have a LG Burner myself, which you can pickup anymore for around $80. So far, its been a very good one and has recognized and read every BD Ive thrown at it, and has burned a few BD discs without problems.

My other one would not read certain BD discs for whatever reason (commericial discs), but from what I had looked into at the time it seemed to be a issue with some players on the PC and certain discs. Not sure thats as much of a issues these days though, but something to a bit aware of.

Sadly I do not know anyhting about the models your looking at, so cant say anything good or bad about them.
They are certainly nice to have, and the ability to burn a BD should you choose to is certainly a nice route to have. Although, the downside is that blank BD media is still on the expensive side.
So just keep that in mind as well.

Another thing to keep in mind is research the media types the burner your looking at will play nice with.

Some will only reliably burn to the more expensive discs (such as Verbatium) and others will burn to a wide variety without much complaint (even the cheaper ones)

Im sure you are quite aware of all this, just thought it was worth mentioning none the less. :) Sometimes (at least for me) its easy to overlook the smaller details like this when looking for a new piece of hardware.

Personally, I wouldn't be looking so much towards burning speed as I would be how reliable they burn first, then speed as a second.

Layback Bear · 26 Jan 2012

I installed a LG Blu-Ray modle #WH12LS30.
I picked that brand because my Intel Dealer has installed and or sold many of them with no problems or come backs. Knock on wood it works well.

pparks1 · 26 Jan 2012

DeaconFrost said:

First, we did recently buy a Canon camcorder that's capable of shooting in full HD.

For reference, I have a Sony Camcorder that shoots in full HD. It takes around 120MB per minute of video. So, I would get roughly 8.3 minutes of video per 1GB.

Before the price of mechanical hard drives skyrocketed, I just purchased the 2TB Samsung SpinPoint F4 hard drives for $79 from NewEgg. I guestimated that these hard drives could hold approx 15,000 minutes of video in HD. This comes out to 250 hours. These hard drives are the equivalent of approx 80 x 25GB BR discs. So, at $79 it "was" cheaper to do a hard drive then it was to buy the blank disks. Considering that today, these same 2TB hard drives are $160, it might not be cost effective anymore. A BR disk at 25GB would hold about 3 hours of HD video from your camcorder.

Wishmaster · 26 Jan 2012

Layback Bear said:

I installed a LG Blu-Ray modle #WH12LS30.
I picked that brand because my Intel Dealer has installed and or sold many of them with no problems or come backs. Knock on wood it works well.

Thats the one I have as well. Its been a very good one so far and Im quite pleased with it.

bobkn · 26 Jan 2012

I've got a bit of a down on LiteOn. I don't buy a lot of optical drives, but I've had a few LiteON drives die fairly early. Perhaps it was just bad luck. As other makes can usually be had for about the same price, I'll go with them.

My current writer is a Pioneer, but I don't make heavy use of it. (No camcorder.)

A warning: I have a history of poor choices in buying archive devices. I may still have one of the original Floptical drives somewhere. (It had 21 MB on what looked like a 3 1/2" floppy disk. Each diskette cost about $20.) I replaced that with a Zip 100 drive (100 MB on a $10 cartridge). I think that Bluray burners have progressed beyond the early adopters, but it's not clear that they'll catch on.

Britton30 · 26 Jan 2012

I too have the same LG Bluray burner, but i've only used it to burn the fre BD-R disk which came with it, I have 25 movies stored on it. the price of BD-R disks seems to be falling and will have no mechanical failures like a mechanical drive might at some point.

Bobkn, First time I have heard of Floptical drives. Did you own a Sony BetaMax too?

profdlp · 26 Jan 2012

bobkn said:

... I have a history of poor choices in buying archive devices. I may still have one of the original Floptical drives somewhere. (It had 21 MB on what looked like a 3 1/2" floppy disk. Each diskette cost about $20.) I replaced that with a Zip 100 drive...

Did you also get to experience the wonderful "Iomega Click of Death" fiasco like I did? Nothing like watching an expensive disk - and 100MB of you data - go 'poof' all of a sudden.