Product Reviews

In case you've been living in a cave for the past month or two, a quick update: there are two new disc formats designed for high definition video, of which one, HD DVD, has just been killed off. That leaves Sony's Blu-ray as the new standard, and here's one of the first affordable drives - ready to add to a desktop PC - that not only plays Blu-ray movies but lets you burn your own Blu-ray discs.

Until now, most people have sensibly resisted investing in either HD DVD or Blu-ray. Even if you've picked the right format and got yourself a set-top Blu-ray player, it's probably out of date already. The Profile 1.1 update to the Blu-ray specification adds interactive features, known as Bonus View, while Profile 2.0 adds online content called BD-Live. Now that Blu-ray is the only format they need to work on, movie distributors should start taking advantage of these with extra content.But nearly all the set-top players in the shops are Profile 1.0. If you want Blu-ray movies in your living room, the best buy is a PlayStation 3. Sony's game console may not be cheap, but you can hardly complain when they're selling it at a loss, and its built-in Blu-ray drive has been updated to Profile 1.1, with the theoretical ability to support 2.0.

Put Blu-ray in your PC, though, and you have the option of creating your own discs too. LG's GGW-H20L is the first Blu-ray writer to cost less than £200, and if you've succumbed and bought a few HD DVD movies, it reads that format too. It can also read and write all DVD and CD media.

Disc writing is rated at 6x for 25GB (single-layer)

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write-once Blu-ray discs (BD-R) and 4x for 50GB (dual layer), but these consumables are thin on the ground as yet, and we only managed to get hold of 2x media for testing. A 25GB disc took 45 minutes and 48 seconds to fill, after we turned off the crippling Defect Management option in the bundled Cyberlink Power2Go software. A 25GB rewritable (BD-RE) disc took 39 minutes; a 50GB BD-RE, 93. DVDs and CDs were quick to burn.

A 25GB BD-R currently costs from £10, and 50GB £20. By comparison, you could fit 50GB on 11 conventional DVD-Rs, which would cost about £4 and burn faster. Even a USB hard disk works out cheaper per gigabyte, and is much quicker. So there's little point in using Blu-ray for backing up files; it's best reserved for HD video. But this is even slower. It took us four hours to convert a 16 minute HD video to Blu-ray format and burn it to disc using Adobe Premiere Elements 4 on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 PC. To fill a 25GB disc with 150 minutes of video would take 37 hours.

Def jam

Let's not forget playback. The bundled CyberLink Hi-Def Suite includes PowerDVD Ultra, which plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD and supports Profile 1.1. However, your hardware needs to be up to scratch as well. Our PC's graphics card didn't support the copy protection used by Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, so we couldn't even play our own home-made discs. Supported graphics cards are listed on LG's website. If your monitor is connected via DVI or HDMI (rather than an analogue cable), it too must be compliant with HDCP copy protection. This is all a right pain, and at a time when online content increasingly comes free of copy protection, it feels a bit of an anachronism.

Blu-ray discs are likely to get faster and cheaper as time goes on, making the H20L's writing capability more useful. For now, at £169 including £65 worth of bundled software and a blank BD-RE disc, the LG drive is an excellent deal even if you mainly just want playback. As long as your PC can cope without needing a new graphics card and monitor, this is a great way to turn it into an HD home cinema that's unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.