LG GBW-H10N

The perfect gift for someone that doesn't know any better.

Sony’s push of Blu-ray has been a costly one – you only have to look at the PS3 to verify that. And yet still HD-DVD persists, helped no doubt by Microsoft’s alliance to the format. Still, it looks like Blu-ray is slowly winning, at least in the exposure rate. One only has to look at Sony’s atrocious trojaning of its player into the latest Bond movie to see that. Or the PS3, naturally. Or the fact that they can force support through its owned studios of Columbia, Tristar and MGM.

On to the drive at hand – a fairly nondescript, although logo heavy unit that handles pretty much every format under the sun. Despite being faster than Sony’s BWU-100A with BD-R, LG’s unit doesn’t handle dual-layer BDs. Considering the take-off of dual-layer DVDs has been less than spectacular and Blu-ray has yet to prove itself, this isn’t exactly the show stopper it may at first appear to be. Perhaps more of a problem is the slow CD-R writing speed, and the surprisingly persistent EIDE interface. Can someone kill this already?

In its favour it does support bitsetting, allowing DVD+R/RWs to be set to the DVD-ROM book type for greater compatability with some standalone or less DVD-friendly devices.

Updating from firmware GL02 to GL04, we used a TDK 2x 25GB BD-RE disc, a Verbatim 8x DVD-R single layer disc, ImgBurn and DVDInfoPro for testing. Unfortunately we did not have a 4x BD-R disc on hand to test the write quality at top speed.

The BD-RE produced a clean 2x write in 44 minutes 48 seconds, at eight percent CPU utilisation – considerably better than the Sony alternative. DVD writing also showed no issue, hitting the rated 8x with no trouble.

If you have to buy Blu-ray right now, the LG is a good choice, or at least a better one than the Sony – however the low CD burning speed, EIDE interface, price and lack of dual-layer support tells us it’d be prudent to wait a little longer.