Sony BWU-200S Blu-ray burner review: Sony BWU-200S Blu-ray burner

Design/Features
The BWU-200S is a gorgeous burner, as far as burners go — but then we'd expect nothing less from the design-conscious gurus at Sony. A black fascia with a translucent smoke-grey tray and blue Blu-ray logo are the main distinctions of this drive, the rest being the bland grey metal box we all know and love that sits inside your PC. It's SATA, like all new drives these days, meaning thin cables and better airflow for your PC than the old ribbon-style IDE cables.

While Blu-ray may have won the high definition war, it will be some time before the prices of BD writers come down. Sony's latest trumps in at AU$899, and has the distinction of being able to write at 4x. Bundled in is a dual-layer 50GB disc (costing around the AU$65 mark), a SATA cable, a molex to SATA power connector, and Cyberlink's BD-Solution pack, containing Power Producer 4, PowerDirector 6, Power2Go 5, PowerBackup 2 and PowerDVD 7. A link is included in the package for a downloadable update to PowerDVD, enabling it to play Blu-ray movies.

The drive is a DVD writer and CD writer as well, so you can live on the older formats while you're waiting for Blu-ray media to come down in price. The full capabilities of the drive are listed below.

Performance
The BWU-200S managed a clean burn of a dual-layer 50GB BD-R verified at 2x in one hour, 32 minutes and 47 seconds using ImgBurn's discovery mode. At the 7GB point, a CPU utilisation spike of 45 percent occurred, indicating there could still be some work to be done on the firmware front; however, for the rest of the write the drive barely touched the CPU.

All up Sony has produced a decent Blu-ray writer — if you need to author Blu-ray discs then you should certainly consider it, despite the AU$899 entry cost. Everyone else though will most likely stick to their AU$40 DVD burners for a little bit longer.