Sony BDU-X10S

Blu-ray discs are finally beginning to become affordable.

Some films can be bought for less than £10, which is a decent price given the great high-definition quality. Blu-ray players are still a little costly, with basic models starting at around £150, but if you have a PC then drives such as this are a cheap alternative.

Fitting the drive was straightforward, as Sata and power cables were included in the box, and Blu-ray player software included on a CD. You’ll need to update this before it can be used, though – broadband is required – and we also had to update the drive’s internal software. This isn’t fiddly once you’ve found and downloaded the file, but it’s an annoying extra step.

With this done, movies played beautifully. A reasonably powerful PC is required to play Blu-ray discs, but we had no problems on our dual-core PC, with a Celeron E1200 processor and Nvidia Geforce 7100 integrated graphics.

The BDU-X10S can’t write any kind of discs, so it’s not versatile, but if all you want to do is play Blu-ray movies it’ll do the job perfectly at a good price.