Sony adds Blu-ray playback to BWU-100A PC drive

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You may recall Sony announcing its BWU-100A Blu-ray drive for PCs back in September, which promised writing and to and playback from Blu-ray discs. Well, the first batch did allow you to write to Blu-ray, but didn’t offer playback of commercial Blu-ray discs. All that has changed with a free software upgrade.

The CyberLink PowerDVD software upgrade enables the playback of commercial Blu-ray movies (BD-ROMs) as well as personally created Blu-ray content. But before you rush off into the land of Blu-ray, you’ll have to check you have a suitable monitor, graphics card and processor to handle the new format.

The BWU-100A reads and records single and dual layer Blu-ray Disc Recordable (BD-R) and Rewritable (BD-RE) media at 2x speed, which, as you know, offers up to 50GB capacity per disc (in real terms, that’s 12,000 MP3s or 100,000 JPEGs). And to save you throwing out all of your old discs, it’s backward read and write compatible with all major DVD and CD formats.

You can pick up the BWU-100A for around £599.

More on the BWU-100A product page

Dave Walker
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