Samsung SH-B123 internal 12x BD-Rom drive Some feel that optical media is dying in favour of digital distribution, however, in this world of high definition content there are still those who'd rather not abandon shiny plastic discs and hence, we have Blu-ray. This is not to say that Blu-Ray is not an important development in digital optical media technology, a 50GB dual …
For £90 you can get a fairly decent Blu-Ray burner. OK, you won't get the 12 x read rate that this device claims (but doesn't seem to get near in the real world), but just how useful is that ability anyway? I'd go for the burner every time, which is really useful if you produce and distribute more HD content than will fit on a DVD.
I'm not sure, but I believe that the speed rate relates to data mode reading/extraction. It was actually the same with DVD players: data mode reading could go up to the rated speed while movie extraction was deliberately locked in the firmware. Hence alternative firmware lying around on the Internet to remove this limitation...
This is a pointless comparison.
Also what's this comment about the pioneer drive producing a sharper image? It's not qualified in any way. A different drive isn't going to have this affect as the mpeg decoding and image rendering is taken care of by the playback software and/or the graphics card.
What you seem to be comparing is one DVD package vs another.
Finally, up-scaling. If you watch a DVD on your computer or on an HD TV, it has been up-scaled. Sometimes this up-scaling is done by your DVD player, sometimes it is done by the TV and sometimes it is done by software either in this case the DVD player software, or in other cases by windows. In all cases it is up-scaled since it started off at 720x576 and ended up at some higher resolution.
Maybe my two points are connected, but whatever :)
Firstly, £90? I have recently built a new media center PC and the BR drive cos £30, with bundled PowerDVD.
However, that particular version of PowerDVD was intentionally crippled (2 channel audio), and the latest version is actually 10, so even this Samsung drive has an old version, most probably tied to the drive as well.
Cyberlink do provide a trial, so you can see if the latest version does what you want on your hardware, but there are about 4 or 5 versions, all with varying degrees of crippledness. The 'best' version is £80! At these prices, most might as well just buy a standalone...
(With the digital nature of BR, I do not understand why the software is £80 and why it needs so much bloat. Simply render the 1080p image 1:1 on my screen, send the audio bitstream to the amp, job done.)
I got this drive a couple weeks back from Newegg to speed up reads, already having two older 8X BD-ROM's. The read speed was slower than either of the 8X readers even after the latest firmware update. I returned the drive and even paid the restocking fee as I would rather put the money towards another reader like one of the two I have. Hopefully there will be more faster readers coming out soon that work better.
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