Philip

Recently I picked up a Blu-Ray burner (the older LG GBW-H10N) on special at about 1/4 the price they originally came out with to tide me over until the media drops in price (now at about $5 US per 4x Memorex BD-R SL) a bit more. A quick connection into my FireWire case + Mac OS X 10.5 and I’m able to burn up to 25 GB a pop (or rather, every $5). The good thing is that Mac OS X supports it without any issues and gets a speedy 8.5 MiB/sec transfer rate for 2x media (under 50 mins for a full disc burn without verification).

Basically if we go by 1 BD-R = 25 GB, about 3 DVD DL discs are needed to store the equivalent amount of data (minus convenience), so it’s starting to look fairly attractive to be able to stash a lot of data onto 1 disc instead of 3 DVD DL’s which cost similarly or more, assuming you are mindful of the eggs-in-one basket issue.

Anyhow I’m keen to see how it pans out, BD-R DL still costs quite a bit, at $20 US a disc it’s just not worth it, similar to how DVD DL discs were when they first came out (and still are a bit on the high side).