Price ?.

Here in Europe and according to geizhals.at you can buy that drive starting at € 200,- http://geizhals.at/eu/a407628.html
This message was edited at: 08-04-2009 08:57

It\'s under $200 US at a few places. I could not get the BD Solutions to install. Kept telling me that it was for a Pioneer device only. Even though it showed as such in Device Manager.

I already own this drive and I am happy with it!

Is it the Scandisk feature really useful to test the quality of the burn, or is it used simply because a surface scan (PI&PO, just like you do with dvds) is not possible? Thanks

Please advise what your comp minimum requirements are to run this Blu Ray burner. Many Thanks

There are no minimum requirements listed for this drive. if you intend to use the drive for watching Blu ray films on the PC, then a fairly powerful CPU and graphics card will be required. CPU Intel E6600 dual core duo of faster would be recommended. Graphics card: ATI 38xx series or faster. nVidia 8500 or faster. To burn BD movies at full speed, a relatively fast HDD will also be required. Any newish SATA drive should be fast enough. USB drives are not fast enough.
This message was edited at: 16-05-2009 15:38

Have this drive for more than a week now. I am very pleased with it ! (Vista 32bit)

[spam]

I have a question, that I hope you can help me with. I have a Hewlett-Packard Pavillion dv5-1017nr. Will this BDR-203bk burner fit in it? The photos shown in this review make it look like it will only fit in a desktop computer.
Thanks

The BDR-20x drives are all desktop drives (5.25" drives), so NO, they won't fit inside a notebook.

Given that there aren't many slim Blu-Ray writers around which one could fit in a laptop in the first place (and even less of them which can reliably burn even on high quality Blu-Ray media), you'll probably be much better off buying either an external Blu-Ray drive or an internal desktop version + a suitable USB/e-SATA enclosure which you can then connect to your laptop via either USB or e-SATA in order to burn Blu-Ray discs.
All in all it will be probably a cheaper and definitely a more reliable and future proof alternative anyway.

Pioneer drives and the latest 10x and 12x LG drives are the only drives worth buying based on their burn performance. Stay away from others (as well as earlier 6x and 8x LG models) which are quite poor.

If you only need a slim Blu-Ray READER for your laptop (instead of a much more expensive Blu-Ray writer), then there's quite a bit of choice available. Stay well away from MatSHITa drives and be aware that firmware support is generally very poor for these drives. I recommend an LG CT10 BD-ROM drive which is pretty much the only drive out there which currently can be easily flashed with different OEM firmware.

CVS - Thx for all the info. I do need a burner, not just a player, for my notebook. So ... since I probably don't have enough computer smarts to piece together a high quality internal drive to an enclosure and make it work, I'm thinking that I'd like to buy a reliable, external burner. The one that appears the best to to me (at least in the 'reasonable affordability' category is, the

LACIE d2 8X BD-R 2X BD-RE 8X

Do you believe this would be a fairly reliable external BD-R burner? Do have any other specific recommendations? I read that the Buffalo external driver isn't that great.

Thank you again for your help

Slimtype burners are a waste of time and money, kinda all of them.
Half-height drives are reliable.

I do not know which 8x drive Lacie is using in their external burner ... might be a Matshita/Panasonic one or an LG one ... in which case you should stay well away.

For their 8x internal drives Buffalo uses both Matshita (Panasonic) drives (models starting with the BR-816 identifier), LG drives (models starting with BR-H816) and Pioneer drives (models starting with BR-PI816).
The problem is that as far as I know they only have 8x external models based on either Matshita (BR-816SU2) or LG (BR-H816SU2, BRHC-6316U2), but not on Pioneer (the BR-PI816SU2 does not exist). Matshita drives are a complete disaster regardless of speed and model, and the 6x or 8x LG drives are quite poor, so you should stay away of both.

If you can find a 10x or 12x external drive, then things are much easier, since the drive inside of those would be either LG or Pioneer and both are very good burners.

The best and probably much cheaper option is to bite the bullet and go for a DIY solution (drive + enclosure). Once you choose the right enclosure (there are several threads around suggesting good ones) it is quite easy to assemble them, so you should really not be put off by the apparent complexity of the task ... you just need to connect the drive using the SATA and power connectors provided in the enclosure, fix the drive in place with a few screws and then mount the enclosure's cover back on ... it is really as simple as that!