14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports emerging from the movie industry claim that the Blu-Ray high-definition format is the new king, while Toshiba's HD DVD needs to be flushed out. Whether you like it or not, Blu-Ray is here to stay and you'd better gear up in order to be able to watch the upcoming movie titles available on Blu-Ray only.
Buffalo is paving the ground for their latest product, a new external Blu-ray burner with a 4x recording speed. The device has started selling on the Japanese market only, but it will soon become available worldwide. The device is alleged to be able to write a 50GB BD-R dual layer in 45 minutes only, but the improvements also concern the reading speeds. The new model can read data at 4x as well, which means that you'll have to wait less until your Blu-Ray movie title loads.
The external Blu-Ray burner can write Blu-ray re-writeable (BD-RE) drives at speeds of 2x tops, which means that a a single layer disc will be ready in just 47 minutes. Buffalo also bundles the Power2Go 5 software, that provides 128-bit AES encryption for your Blu-ray disc data archive. Movie playback is "directed" by the PowerDVD 7 BD software, also included in the package.
The Blu-Ray external unit comes in two flavors, depending on the desired connectivity method. The SATA internal version sells for about $450, while the USB 2.0 version will ship for an estimative retail price of $494. All the drives offer Plug-and-Play functionality and will include Buffalo's TurboUSB technology. A notable aspect is the fact that Buffalo finally decided to integrate the power adapter into the optical disk's chassis.
The Buffalo BR-416U2 external Blu-Ray drive will be available worldwide from mid-March.