This probably doesn't hold a great deal of relevance due to the lack of supporting media for it, but Sony has become the second known manufacturer (Buffalo surprisingly beat them to it recently) of an internal Blu-ray writer that's capable of writing to BD-R at 8x speed. This equates to a full 25GB disc being written in around 15 mins and a dual layer 50GB disc in around half an hour or so.

The new BWU-300S from Sony can also burn DVDs at up to 16x, CDs at 48x and carries support for DVD-RAM as well. To emphasise blu-ray playback support, Sony also chuck in a copy of Men In Black along with software from Cyberlink to both burn and watch Blu-ray content.

An official price tag is yet to be given but it's expected to go on sale for somewhere around the vicinity of $350, with shipment of the drives beginning this week. But as always, it's the cost and market presence of the media that we need to see improve more so than the hardware.