When the first Blu-ray disk players came out, they cost over £1,000. Since then, speeds have gone up and prices have come down until we have the Lite-On iHBS112, a 12x Blu-ray drive which can be had from several sources for just under £100.

This is a 5.25-inch, short-form, internal drive with a SATA connection. It slides easily into place in virtually any drive bay and connection takes only a few seconds. Windows recognises it as a DVD drive, but it has full Blu-ray credentials and comes with CyberLink BD Solution.

This is a suite of Blu-ray utilities, including a movie player, disc burner, audio, photo and disk copiers. They work, where appropriate, with DVDs and CDs too, and are more than adequate for basic disc tasks. Power BD, the Blu-ray player, is particularly well-appointed for part of a bundled software suite. Check with your supplier that BD Solution is included with the drive, as OEM versions of the product may not include it.

The drive is claimed to be 3D content compatible, and can even convert 2D content to simulate 3D, while playing back movies. This was something we weren't able to test, though this is currently something of a niche feature.

You'll be hard put to achieve the extra write speed the drive is capable of. This isn't through any fault of the Lite-On drive, but rather that there's currently no media we could find that supports 12x recording. Even the sample discs supplied with the review drive only support 6x. At that speed, it took just under 16:30 to write a full, 23GB BD-R disc and, somewhat surprisingly, slightly longer (16:43) to read the same data back.

With a recordable, erasable BD-RE disc, which was only 2x, a full recording took 1 hour 40 minutes to write and 16:05 to read back. The drive is capable of 16x when writing a DVD and 48x on CDs and it can handle DVD-RAM, as well as DVD±R and DVD±RW.

With the Pioneer BDR-203BK Blu-ray recorder we reviewed a while back, Pioneer accredited certain brands of 4x disk as capable of supporting the drive's 8x speed, which was then cutting edge. Lite-On doesn't appear to have done the same thing with the iHBS112, as BD Solution resolutely selected the speed ratings of the supplied Verbatim media and wouldn't offer the 12x speed the drive should be capable of. This is likely to change over time, of course, as higher-specified media filters through.

Verdict
This is a good, robust recordable Blu-ray drive, but it relies heavily on faster media becoming available. When you can get an 8x drive for £50, you've got to be sure you can get the extra speed out of this 12x one and that you really need the small reduction in recording times that the extra speed is likely to provide.

Company: Lite-On Corporation

Contact: +31 40 2508000

Tags: dvd blu-ray disc cyberlink nintendo satoru iwata wii arts movies