Buffalo’s First External Blu-ray/HD DVD Drive March 27, 2008

Read more Blu-ray , Entertainment , Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , HD DVD , HDTV , Home Entertainment , Laptops , Movies , PC , Peripherals

What’s going on this week? First we had Plextor unveiling its new internal Blu-ray/HD DVD drives for PCs and now Buffalo has launched its own external combo drive.

This Blu-ray & HD DVD Combo Drive is the company’s first external optical disk drive and it supports both read/write Blu-ray and read HD DVD formats. The drive offers single and double layer Blu-ray read/write speeds of up to 6x, HD DVD read speed of up to 3x and DVD read/write speeds of up to 16x.

I can’t help but think these drives would have been more useful to us all last year when the HD DVD format wasn’t so, um, dead.

The drive is Plug & Play via any USB interface and comes with Buffalo’s TurboUSB technology and a copy of Nero 8 – with HD support – for burning and editing video files.

Gerardine Lynch, Product Marketing Manager at Buffalo Technology, comments, “In 2007, over 2.5 million units of high definition DVDs were sold in Europe, highlighting the rapid rate at which consumers are adopting this new format.”

The Blu-ray & HD DVD Combo Drive will ship next month from Amazon, Dabs.com, Misco and Play.com at an estimated street price of £284, excluding VAT.-Martin Lynch

[Buffalo]

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