Sony announces availability of BWU-100A Blu-ray burner in Europe

An interesting news from Sony Europe: Now available in Europe, the first Sony Blu-ray Disc (BD) drive retail kit for PCs.

According to Christoph Cyrol, Product Marketing Manager in Sony Europe's IT Peripherals division:

'With capacity for up to 4 hours of HDV 1080i Video shot with a HDV Camcorder, our first Blu-ray Disc drive kit is the ideal medium for both amateur and professional videographers and video editors working with HD. With 50GB of storage - enough for 12,000 MP3 files or up to 100,000 JPEG images - and quick random access, the drive also offers personal and small business users an advanced optical data backup and archiving solution.'

A more cryptic issue is related to playing back commercial Blu-ray movies, that require "a free software upgrade and a suitably-specified playback environment."

What exactly this "suitably-specified playback environment" is not explained, but probably it's only a trick to force end-consumers to buy another tool 😉

The kit also contains CyberLink BD Solution and will be available from September 2006 at an estimated end user price of £ 649 incl. VAT (about € 955, but VAT charge varies according the Country.)

More informations can be read in the original article here.

Source: Bios Magazine