Sony Optiarc unveils new Blu-ray burners

It seems like it was just last week that Blu-ray burners were a thousand bucks and almost no one had them. Once HD DVD died off the price for Blu-ray players and drives for computers started to come down and today you can pick up a BDR for your PC pretty cheaply. Sony Optiarc has a bunch of Blu-ray drives that it offers for computer users and it has added a couple new offerings to its line.

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Both of the new drives share the same features and the only difference is that one of them is packaged for retail sale and the other is an OEM drive. The drives are both half-height 5.25-inch internal optical drives that use the SATA port for connectivity. The drives can burn to single layer 6x media at 12x speed.

That fast 12x burning speed means that a full 25GB disc only takes 10 minutes to burn. The drives can also write to dual layer BD-R media at 8x speed. The OEM version of the drive is the BD-5300S. The retail boxed version of the drive is the BWU-500S. The 500S comes with a copy of CyberLink Media Suite 8 software and a single 25GB Blu-ray disc. Pricing is unannounced, but both versions of the drive will ship this month.