OWC intros external Blu-ray drives with quad output
updated 01:20 pm EDT, Wed October 22, 2008
OWC external BD burners
Other World Computing (OWC) on Wednesday introduced its Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drives, the first on the market, the company says, that include a quad interface. This includes FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity options for both Macs and PCs, allowing the external drives to write Blu-ray media at speeds up to 4X or 150MBps, or twice as fast as OWC's previous generation BD burners.
In addition to being capable of recording to blank Blu-ray discs, including dual-layer ones with 50GB of capacity, the Mercury drives will also record onto HD-DVD, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW media. The Mercury drives will not play back original feature movies recorded on Blu-ray discs, however.
The OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583 is available now, priced at nearly $500, and includes the required cables for each of the four connection options along with two blank 25GB BD-R discs. The OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583T adds Roxio Toast 9 Titanium software for Mac OS X support.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jan 2007
Blue-Ray playback
Why not playback? Is it an issue with how to display it on the mac? Is it the speed of the interface from the drive to the computer? Is it the licensing? Steve Jobs described the licensing of Blue-Ray as "a whole bag of hurt" at the recent laptop event. Someone or some organization is making what could have been the Blue-ray revolution into the Blue-ray headache! I need this device for archiving but I am worried the playback issue will lead to another device standard rendering this device obsolete. I could just be paranoid but even paranoids are sometimes right!