Plextor's new Blu-ray drives also read HD DVD
Though Toshiba has bowed out of the format race, there're still about 1.5 million HD DVD movies already on the market. This means you can't just ignore them all together. For this reason, it's good news for consumers today that Plextor announced two new internal Blu-ray drives that also read HD DVD.
The first drive--the PX-B920SA--is a Blu-ray recorder capable of recording BD-R media up to 4x (18MB/sec) and BD-RE media up to 2x. The second drive--the PX-B300SA--doesn't have Blu-ray recording capability.
Both drives can read Blu-Ray media up to 4.8x and HD DVD media up to 3.0x. They are also backward compatible with all DVD and CD formats, both in playback and recording at high-speed. These drives are internal and use a Serial ATA interface that offers better throughput than the traditional IDE interface.
Plextor will ship the new drives with a complete package of playback and recording software including: InterVideo WinDVD 8, Ulead MovieFactory 5.5 SE, and Burn.Now 4.5 SE.
Both the PX-B920SA and the PX-B300SA are available for consumer purchase by the end of this month with hefty price of $599 and $499, respectively.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
