Product Reviews

Even if you've been following the high-definition format war closely, you can be forgiven for being confused about the current state of play. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray have, rather prematurely, claimed victory by citing all sorts of sales statistics, but the jury is still very much out.

There is a crucial difference, though. You can buy a Blu-ray drive, such as the LG here, and in addition to watching high-definition movies, you can write to blank Blu-ray discs. This is in contrast to the currently available HD DVD drives - these are only capable of reading HD DVD discs, which limits them to playing back HD movies.

The LG GBW-H10N has one of the lowest prices we've seen for a Blu-ray drive yet and it's also one of the fastest, with a claimed 4x write

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speed against most others' 2x - a single layer disc will take about 22 minutes to complete. It also has extensive support for other formats (HD DVD naturally excluded), including all dual-layer DVD discs and CD. While the speeds for these don't approach DVD combo drives, they're not far off, so this could conceivably be your only optical drive.

That's all very well, but there's simply no convincing reason to use Blu-ray for data storage. Compared to the price of hard disks (you can get an external 500GB hard disk for under £140 these days), you'd have to be addicted to shiny things to consider anything else.

That leaves us with the other reason for Blu-ray - HD movies. Take a quick look online and you'll soon see that more of your favourite movies are available on Blu-ray than HD DVD. You'll also need a high-end PC to cope with playback and a high-end TV to really take advantage of the sharper images. If you've got all that, and £400 left over, it may be tempting.

For most people though, it's difficult to justify. It's not Blu-ray's fault in itself - it works well and new technology is always expensive. However, there's simply no reason to blow so much money on something that has neither tangible benefit nor a clear future ahead of it. Rest assured that we'll let you know when the time to jump is - but it's not now.