14 DAY TRIAL // LG's burner looks just like a conventional drive. It is just a little heavier than your average ATAPI unit and - unlike the Pioneer Blu-ray burner - it does have support for the DVD-RAM format. Bundled software CD includes LG's ODD firmware update utility, CyberLink package called BD solution which comes in form of PowerDVD v6.6 BD, InstantBurn v5.2 for UDF Packet writing, Power2Go v5 for DVD writing, PowerBackup v2.5 and PowerProducer v3 (this one can be upgraded to PowerProducer v4 which adds capture, record, author and burn features for both Blu-ray and HD DVDs).
On the downside, when you check the writing/reading list you'll notice that there's no writing support for dual-layer Blu-ray (50GB disks) and the CD/DVD writing speeds are pretty low. But since the price of the solution is lower than what others are asking for Blu-Ray burners, you'll soon get past that.
Burning about 15GB of data at 4X takes 15.5 minutes which translates into an average speed of 1GB/s. And that's twice as fast as Pioneer's Blu-Ray Burner which can only write the media at 2X. However, if you choose to use a BD-RE disk, prepare for a long night since the same 15GB will be written to the RE disk in 85 minutes (yep, there's no mistake). In case you choose UDF format instead of the standard ISO one you will cut about 30 minutes off the time it takes to write the disk, but it will still keep the unit busy for about 55 minutes. As for CD/DVD writing times, everything is in par with the specs.
The unit comes with a utility called BD/HD Advisor which can scan your PC to see if it can cope with Blu-Ray writing and playing. While the writing part only requires a mainstream PC, the playing asks for a capable graphics card (Ati X1300, Nvidia 7300 or higher) with the latest drives installed in order to properly decode the HD stream without skipping frames. Overall, it's an honorable performance at a proper price (about $800-$1000). We hope that future firmwares will cut down on the BD-RE writing times.