Features

There are still two issues with Blu-ray writing: speed and price. Writing to current Blu-ray drives is slower than writing to DVD, and with so much more capacity, burning a disc can take a lot longer. If you actually want to write a Blu-ray video disc, rather than just using the format for high-capacity file storage, you'll wait even longer, because encoding the video is also

ADVERTISEMENT

time-consuming. It took us 45 minutes to write a full complement of files to a 25GB 2x BD-R disc, and over an hour and a half to fill a 50GB 2x BD-RE. Converting just 16 minutes of HD home video and burning it took four hours.

Then there's the cost. A 25GB BD-R will currently set you back around a tenner - that's for one disc. You could buy 50 DVD-Rs for that, working out at 4p a gigabyte compared to BD-R's 40p. A new storage medium that's ten times more expensive doesn't sound like progress, does it? Of course, these prices are bound to come down, but by the time the media are cheap, your drive may be looking slow compared to those that have become available in the meantime.

So unless your heart's set on releasing your own home-made Blu-ray movies, it's debatable if a Blu-ray burner is a useful investment. Looking at it the other way round, there's no reason to feel you're missing out on anything important if you choose a read-only drive.