Lite-On Out With Affordable Blu Ray Drive

[btarunr]

Optical drive specialist Lite-On is released a new Blu Ray drive, the iHOS104, which started shipping this week. At US $69.99, the drive provides reading Blu Ray discs at 4x speed, 8x for DVD-ROM, and 32x for CD-ROM. It supports reading known sub-formats of the media. The drive packs 2 MB of cache, and uses a standard SATA interface. It comes with a copy of Cyberlink TrueTheater software.



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[mtosev]

a very good price. plus its a Liteon. 70Eur in europe

 

[BobBarr]

sweet been looking for a low price blue ray drive to add

 

[A Cheese Danish]

Very nice price on the player. Now we need a cheaper version of a blu-ray burner, too bad that most likely will not come soon.

 

[Mega-Japan]

Yeah, affordable, but it's a not a BD-RW, which is what I need unfortunately...

 

[twicksisted]

hmmm .... ive never had a cd/dvd drvie fail on me before (in 20 years of pc building) untill i bought an external lite-on... what a piece of crap.
though i guess it was one drive and i couldve been unlucky.

sometimes things are cheap for a reason

 

[kenkickr]

Damn good price for a reader To bad the media will never be cheap enough to help bring the burners down in price

 

[t77snapshot]

sometimes things are cheap for a reason

Yeah, that was my first thought on this drive. But then again I would have to test it really know.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Not that big a jump.

Well honestly, this is one of their first Blu-ray drives. Lite-On has been making better models, and sell the older designs at a cheaper price. This drive in particular was only $76.99, well now. This is honestly, not a big price cut for this drive. $7 is nice, but it is still just $7.

P.S. I am with you. I want a say....$30 price drop average on Blu-ray burners. And a 20% drop in the media. That would help a lot more.

 

[DaveK]

I can get the LG for €99 and the BD-RW for €165. Probably wont see this for sale, but €99 isn't bad.

 

[Studabaker]

With them already having DVD burners with BD reading capability at under $100 I don't see the big deal here.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

How long would it actually take to burn a 25gb/50gb disc though? In the uk,50gb discs are £20,i'd kill someone/thing if i had a misburn on one of those.

 

[INSTG8R]

How long would it actually take to burn a 25gb/50gb disc though? In the uk,50gb discs are £20,i'd kill someone/thing if i had a misburn on one of those.

I hear that

 

[TheLaughingMan]

yet another one.

With them already having DVD burners with BD reading capability at under $100 I don't see the big deal here.

This is just another one. All Blu-ray drives can burn DVD's. and all Blu-ray burners can burn DVD's as well.

 

[dustyshiv]

hmmm .... ive never had a cd/dvd drvie fail on me before (in 20 years of pc building) untill i bought an external lite-on... what a piece of crap.
though i guess it was one drive and i couldve been unlucky.

sometimes things are cheap for a reason

Two DVD-RWs (internal) failed on me!!

Never go Liteon again.

 

[IcrushitI]

Give the reader away for free.

If the movie industry wants me to buy BR movies at around $30 a pop right away, maybe they should throw in a reader. Somewhat like the printer companies. When you can buy a cheap printer for less then the price of the refills. The BR disks can't cost more then 2 to 5 bucks each, someone help me out on the wholesale price of a mass produced BR movie.

 

[lemonadesoda]

In case it wasnt clear: this is a READER drive. Not a writer.

 

[Studabaker]

This is just another one. All Blu-ray drives can burn DVD's. and all Blu-ray burners can burn DVD's as well.

In case it wasnt clear: this is a READER drive. Not a writer.

^

 

[Weer]

Yeah, affordable, but it's a not a BD-RW, which is what I need unfortunately...

Mine works well.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

First to Admit it

I did a little digging and this is just a DVD ROM/Blu-ray drive. I was indeed wrong. Some the Blu-Ray drives (especially the cheap ones) do only play discs.

This doesn't change my original point that Lite-On already has a Blu-ray drive for $76.99 so this is still just a small price cut. Hell, they also make a Blue-ray Drive/DVD burner w/ Lightscribe for $90. I say spend the extra $20 (if you don't already have a burner).

 

[Soylent Joe]

Do you have to have special hardware in order to run a Blu-ray drive?

 

[Fitseries3]

i'll hold off for the samsung.

 

[wiak]

Do you have to have special hardware in order to run a Blu-ray drive?

sata connector on motherboard
a modern video card aka Radeon HD or Geforce 8800 or higher for hardware decoding of blu-ray video codecs
and a Blu-Ray Playback software like Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre, CyberLink PowerDVD, or Corel WinDVD

 

[DaveK]

Do you have to have special hardware in order to run a Blu-ray drive?

No, you don't need special hardware to run a Blu-ray drive, but there are requirements to play the movies. The requirements for PowerDVD can be found here.

 

[Mussels]

No, you don't need special hardware to run a Blu-ray drive, but there are requirements to play the movies. The requirements for PowerDVD can be found here.

if you dont have vista or 7, you dont have HDCP which means you cant play blu ray titles.
You can still use the drive itself on other operating systems.


This drive is already for sale in AU, for $120. Its the cheapest one i can find, and its only just launched!