LG announces 4X Blu-Ray recorder

I bet it takes all night to record 25 GB. I'll never buy this product. 4x Speed is not fast enough with today's media. I will, however, buy it if speeds reach 20 or higher. Guess I'll be waiting forever, but that's the risk I'm willing to take.

Very interesting... Speeds very slow at the moment but will proberly increase... Would be a big problem if you were burning like 10gB+ as it would take several hours never mind 25/50gB... I suspect they will not come into the mainstream for burning for a long time unless burning speeds increase.

Lg makes crappy phones why invest in a Blu-ray player if it cant burn DL 50gigs. What a waste of 1000 bucks.

What difference does it make HOW fast this machine will burn. With all the anti-copying mechanisms in place on TV's and Receivers such as no recording from HDMI/Component Video sources, all you're gonna get is a HD burn of a analog source. Is that worth over a grand? I think not..

Is this a stand alone or a drive in the computer either way its awsome that it will Write the old format and the new format I new if they wanted too they could put them together in one unit.

Personally I would not invest in Blu-ray OR HD-DVD technology at this point. IMHO the multi layer (more than dual layer) disc formats that are soon to be introduced will eat both these formats for lunch before Blu-ray and HD-DVD even get established. The fact that these greedy A-holes could not agree on one standard is another reason I will not support either of these formats. Sorry to go all negative but they can keep their shiny new overpriced, DRMed to death, format war discs.

Why even consider selling a product that is half useless, I guess its also safe to say, that the other half is half useless...lloloolloll Can burn 25 gb, but not 50 gb? What's the point. Immediate flop on sales to be expected.

Sweet.... lets hope I just pop in my ps3 disc into that drive and then just rip the stuff and reburn..kidda like ps2.... no strong modd protection. And someone come up with ps3 swap magic.

Let's see 4x, 4x what though? If it's the same relative speed as DVD (i.e. 25/4.7 x what is now) then a disc would take a mere 57 minutes to record. Slow enough.

Of course they will bring higher speeds to this type of writer, but hey they got to make millions on the lower speeds first. Just think of how much $$$ they would loose by introducing the 40X HDDVD Writer, & don't think for one second that it is not coming. I say in the next 7-10 yrs it will be here. We will be burning these HD DVD's at 40X or higher with outstanding results. Technology just keeps getting better & better, don't knock the science...knock the MPAA if anything.

When it comes down to it, this burner at 4x is faster then a DVD player at a greater speed just because it is writing a good deal more data. And when it comes down to it, I probably wouldn't burn at anything faster even if I had the choice with how much money it would be if the burn fails, might as well do it right.

"With all the anti-copying mechanisms in place on TV's and Receivers such as no recording from HDMI/Component Video sources, all you're gonna get is a HD burn of a analog source."- Let's not act like someone isn't going to break any kind of copy protection within the first few years this technology is out. I seem to remember the MPAA saying that no one would break the encryption on DVDs and, well, they did. It's all a matter of time and they'll probably do it long before i own either one.

here is approx how BD will record at different speeds on a single layer (double the times for dual layer recording): 1x = 93 minutes 2x = 46.3 minutes 4x = 23 minutes 6x = 15.5 minutes 8x = 11.5 minutes 10x = 9.25 minutes 12x = 8 minutes The limit on speed is based on the hardwares speed, so approx 12x will be max. Since only 4x is supported now, the other speeds are theoretical... The times were calculated using a simple formula taking into account that 1x for Blue Ray is 36Mbps.

who will need a Blueray burner if most people will be staying with standard DVD, untill the price drops to a comparison of todays DVD players and burners, its just a gadget for the must have it crowd. When Sonys PS3 comes out let's see how Blueray will be utalised in the games and film market.

36Mbps? How did we come to that conclusion?

As a small retail outlet and seeing the amount of returned LG DVD burners there are (7 in one week, and im not the only one in my area) I will not be buying or selling these until much later. But I now know why they are coming back to me, LG is neglecting them Life's Not So Good

It doesn't matter what drives they make. Don't buy anything new until the competition brings on the price drops!

My LG drive's fine, dunno what's happened to you...

JaguarGod: Thanks for the numbers, I was crunching them in my head when scrolling thru the thread. These numbers sound right for the 25GB format but the price is still way out there and most people aren't going to go for it right away. I remember my first 4X cd burner... top of the line - $250 bucks!!! Now, people are giving them away because 4X is way too slow!!! It wasn't long ago when 16X DVD burners were that price. I was at a supercenter last night (god help me!!!) and they have 16X DL/DVD burners out now for less than $50!!! So, comparativealy speaking, the prices should be dropping shortly enough so that someone I know will have one I can go check out and see if it's worth getting one - at a much later date. I can buy DL DVD's now for less than $3 a piece and that is all the storage space I need for 99% of what I use them for.

"I can buy DL DVD's now for less than $3 a piece and that is all the storage space I need for 99% of what I use them for."- Word right.

My first CDRW drives, short-lived though they were (neither lasted more than 2 months and I havent bought anything from acer or benq since) were £95 for 40x20x10 with no DVD functionality, works about $180 in today's money.

@sammorris, That number was taken from Blue-Ray.com. 1x is defined as 36Mbps: Blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed" class="korostus" target="_blank">http://www.Blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_speed It also discusses the limitation on speed and estimates that as fast as 12x may be possible with a 10,000 RPM drive.

Only 10,000rpm? Hmm, not great is it? I seem to remember CD-ROMs achieving 22-24,000 I think.

I proud of all of these people that try to see how far they can push technology. One question. WHY DO PEOPLE NEED A DISK TO HOLD 25 GIG. It's pointless. It's like the terabyte. No one is ever going to need it.

If it wasn't needed, they wouldn't make it. I could fill a terabyte, easy. 25GB discs aren't necessarily for now, but for the future, and when the time comes that games need them (after all Vista when fully extracted is looking at 15GB, above that of a 9GB DL, though admittedly it may compress onto one disc). Console games don't need installing, so they can't be compressed, and as such will use that "extracted" amount. And don't forget we don't need 25GB straight away, that's just the new limit, we only need ABOVE 9. We'll be at 25 in not too long, mark my words. Oh, and if we don't need 25GB, how do you propose to make 1080p films then eh? Put a new disc in every 30 minutes? I think not.

Well put!!! I could also fill a Terabite disc full easilly. Within the next 5+ years, OS's will need large amount of space and the DL DVD's just won't be enough - for now they work great, but future tech. will require much more space for back-ups and other apps. Remember 5 years ago when a 20GB HD was large and 100GB was either unherd of or to expensive for the average consumer? Now the average HD is at least 120 GB and I know some people who run at least a 250GB HD and have another 250GB as a secondary HD!!!

In 2002 I was going to have a second hard disk to aid my 13GB Seagate Medalist. Think that may have been 5400rpm ATA-66. I chose a 60GB and he said "60GB that's a lot of memory". In the end it wouldn't fit into my crap OEM case!!! lol I ended up with a mere 16GB IBM Deskstar (before they became Hitachis).

If we listen to some of the people on this thread we would have never broke the 640K program barrier or moved from floppies to CD’s and beyond. Comparing companies as being greedy because they are competing for a standard in their favor is short sighted, should companies try to fail instead? Comparing max RPM speeds to a device that does multiple layers and larger quantities is not comparing apples to apples. LG drives are good drives people will bring back anything these days and normally there is nothing wrong with what they bring back. I’m glad to see BD on the shelves as the price will drop sooner. Hopefully more manufactures will come out with burners for us, the more competition the better it is for the consumer. I hope they don’t drag their feet like they did on DL were media is very limited still and is just now getting reasonable in price. The price is too high for me at the moment but it would be nice to put 3 uncompressed movies on one disc not to mention the personal files I could load onto it. The drive may be high priced but what about the media right now is it $60 a disc, like DL’s were or is it even higher. Sammorris, Get rid of that crap OEM case. LOL

Lol agree with most of that Mr. Movies, though I won't be buying a Bluray drive until they're well under £100, and preferably 8x4 at least. DL functionality 'd be good too. Lol @ the OEM case. This was 2002, a Pentium 3 450mhz on an MSI mATX motherboard with a brown PCB (when that was the norm), and it until then had integrated 8MB Rage Pro Video, no AGP slots, only PCI and CNR. Top of the line 32x6 DVD-ROM drive it had lol. I since bought a new prebuilt in 2004, the current system in terms of CPU, Mobo and one optical drive. The rest changed for a Super Flower SF-464-T2-S Case, dirt cheap and great looks, an X800Pro AGP Video card (I still havent moved to PCI express), an LG GSA-4163 DVD writer, hercules sound card and new fans/heatsinks. changed to 1GB RAM from 512, original stick got fried by PSU #3. PSU #4 is a Hiper so things should hum till I buy my next system, hopefully in about a month's time. (PSU 1 was a solid 250W OEM inWin PSU, #2 was an ebuyer extra value 600W that wasn't good for 300. Quickly replaced with a Qtec 450 that caused me major hassle last year in fried components. Still, life goes on!)

It is my professional opinion that L G stands for Load of Garbage.

And it is my professional opinion that that statement is garbage. If all you've come here to do is slag off a brand without any evidence, you can return to that can, Oscar.

I bet those Drives will be made in Japan, so they will probably be very good. I am pleased with the quality from Made in Japan Electronics and media. LG is a brand I have heard of and they would not make these drives crap... I bet Sony will be watching them like hawks in terms of quality control as well, because if the drives are going to be bad, then the format might be blamed. What happens if someone buys a blank disc for $50 and a drive for (I can't see the price so I am assuming $1000), and they burn say one coaster out of ten... That would make the format seem as an unreliable one and people will lose trust and stray away from it and it will die very soon as a means of backing up data. Oh, and I was reading about that crap OEM case. I have one of those as well and it is one of those Micro towers. Well that thing doesn't even fit 1 HDD. After a bit of work on it, I added 2 Hard Drives and some fans. I totally tore out all the plastic from the case and took out the sides. I then took my drill and started making holes and added a custom made HDD/Floppy/HDD mount for it. Everything fits. Sure, I have cables haning out everywhere and the DVD Drives stick out 2 inches in the front, but it now performs very well and people always comment on the way it looks!!

It dosen't matter how it looks as long as it does what you want it to do. People comment on some of "Frankenstiens" I've put together but once they see how well they work, they want me to work on theirs as well.

I can't be bothered by all that. I'm getting myself a proper case from the start:

Very NICE, Sweet!

Yeah, as gay as this sounds, it was one of them "love at first sight" things, but in an I like the look of it fashion, not an I want to do something special to it sort of way. Oh, OK it was that sense too but only by putting a UV cold cathode in it!

sammorris: It looks like an industral kitchen appliance of some sort-indestructable but modern!!!

Industrial kitchen appliances don't have cool LED screens, and blue lights.