Final Thoughts

The ASUS BC-1205PT is not only a very capable Blu-ray reader but is also excellent at burning those DVDs and installing those games. The thing is though, while this is all fantastic we would recommend that if the space is available that you get a standard DVD Writer/Reader for all those mundane tasks and let the BC-1205PT simply handle Blu-ray media only. With the low cost on DVD drives there isn't really any reason you couldn't have one sitting in the system alongside your Blu-ray ROM.

Performance is good - Blu-ray generally seems to be great in the access department but we can still see that the burst rate is quite a bit behind that of the Pioneer DVR-212BK DVD burst. This is slightly worrying - to give you an idea it took 6 minutes for the DVD test to complete on the Pioneer DVR-212BK, around 8 minutes on the BC-1205PT and a whopping 70 minutes for the BD-50 disk. The slightly slower burst speed isn't that much of an issue when dealing with a few gigs here and there, but once you get into the 25+ GB territories copying is quite slow - this is of course to be expected of new technology though, so it's not really a problem with ASUS or the drive.

Movies look simply fantastic and on a screen like the Dell 30" which has a huge 2560 x 1600 resolution screenshots simply don't do the image justice, there are huge improvements over DVD and the greater capacity on Blu-ray when compared to HD-DVD could really seal the deal for Sony as the media of choice for the next generation of movie lovers.

To really sum it all up, if you're an absolute image quality freak and demand simply the best from your components the BC-1205PT which will be released later this year should be on your shopping list. Coming into December and the holidays let's hope that it's a high def Christmas for everyone.