Lite-On will launch a new 4X Blu-ray Disc Writer for the European users, the company announced today. The new optical drive, DH-4B1S, comes as a follower to the highly appreciated LH-2B1S, one of the pioneers on the Blu-ray drives market.

DH-4B1S is able to reach a 4X speed at writing BD-R media, that being a 50% increase in speed in comparison to the older LH-2B1S, as well as a lot of time saving. The writing strategy of DH-4B1S is the use of a Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) method for writing BD-R media. This translates in its capacity of maintaining a constant data transfer rate of 18 MB per second (4X) from the beginning to the end of the writing session.

The use of CLV writing strategy may place DH-4B1S first on the BD writing speeds top. The 6X BD Writers use a different strategy, called Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). That means that the writing starts at a lower speed and increases gradually as the process approaches the finish line, reaching the maximum of 6X only in the end of the session. It seems that this strategy gives best results only when consumers use the full capacity of the disks they write data on. But there are only few users that would use the entire disk when making a back-up of their data.

"If you use only 75-80% of the disc capacity, a 4X CLV writing strategy will be a quicker solution than a 6X CAV strategy," says Marketing Manager Jelmer Veldman. "We see a growing market acceptance for Blu-ray as the format of choice for High Definition content playback and for high volume archiving. With this 4X BD writer Lite-On delivers a faster solution for backing-up data on Blu-ray Discs."

DH-4B1S features a 2X speed at writing PBD-RE media and can read BD-ROM discs at 4X. The optical drive has also the capacity of writing DVD±R at 12X and DVD±R DL at 8X. For DVD+RW it features only a 8X writing speed, 6X for DVD-RW. Also, it can reach 40X for CD-R (both reading and writing), and 24X for CD-RW.

By the end of May, Europe will be able to enjoy Lite-On's DH-4B1S. The company complements its portfolio with this drive, placing it beside its internal and external BD-ROM drives.