Review: Liteon LH-2B1S Blu-ray drive

A year on since the first drives started to appear, there's still no clear winner in the HD-DVD versus Blu-ray battle. While HD-DVDs had an early lead in the film space, Blu-ray drives have been far more widespread on the PC front than HD-DVD drives.

The Liteon LH-2B1S is one such Blu-ray drive. To differentiate it from the other drives out there it has a translucent plastic strip across its front containing three LEDs to show whether a DVD, CD or Blu-ray disc is in the drive. At 17.8cm long it's a relatively short drive, just over 1cm shorter than the Sony BWU-100A drive - the saved space can be useful even in big PC cases.

The drive is connected via a serial ATA port on the back, so users of older PCs with parallel ATA connections won't be able to use it. However, it's a step in the right direction since Sata has faster transfer speeds and also uses a smaller, more convenient cable.

The drive comes with a single CD labelled "Cyberlink BD Solution". This bundles a version of Cyberlink Power DVD 6 for Blu-ray movie playback and Instant Burn software for burning Blu-ray discs. Although you wouldn't think it given its name, Instant Burn is incredibly slow since it first creates an image of the data it will write. We found this takes two and a half hours, and that's before the burning process has even begun.

To avoid this time-wasting we tried installing a retail copy of Nero 7, which has native support for writing to Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. However, we found that just before the software started burning data, the whole program would crash. We tried to update the software using Nero's built-in updater, but this required multiple reboots to the point where we gave up.

Finally we skipped the built-in downloader and downloaded the 190MB update direct from Nero's website. With Nero crashing no longer, the drive wrote 23,087MB of assorted files to a blank disc in 46 minutes 28 seconds. As a 2x drive, this is par for the course.

It also has a slightly faster DVD read and write speeds than competitors. LG is currently selling a competing Blu-ray drive, the GBWH10N, that can write to 4x BD-R (write-once) discs and 2x BD-RE (re-writable) for £440, thus making it faster and cheaper. However, 4x BD-R discs aren't on sale yet, plus we'd skip BD-R discs altogether since at about £10, they only cost around £2 less than BD-RE discs.

The LH-2B1S compares favourably against most other Blu-ray drives, but the drive is expensive and discs still work out at 43p per Blu-ray gigabyte compared with 3p per gigabyte for DVDs. Poor software and uncertainty about Blu-ray's future means only the dedicated (or foolhardy) should buy.

Also consider:
Pioneer BDR-101A
Another Blu-ray drive for those with deep pockets

Microsoft Xbox 360 HD DVD player
A great way for Xbox 360 owners to sample high definition movies

HP Dvd940i
No Blu-ray or HD-DVD capabilities, but it comes with Lightscribe

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