ASUS BC-1205PT Blu-ray combo

Put your shiny 24" monitor to some good use and get Blu-ray playback on a, er, "budget".

ASUS is about to unleash a Blu-ray reading combo drive onto the market, which offers up a tempting Blu-ray player/reader as well as all the standard DVD and CD writer capabilities that we now all take for granted. One thing you should note right up front is that the BC-1205PT is essentially a re-badged Pioneer BDC-202.

We tested the unit with several Blu-ray titles such as Ice Age 2, Hero, 300 and the Chronicles of Narnia. At a viewing resolution of 1920 x 1080 native 1080p, we were expectedly stunned by the clarity, sharpness and contrast in the motion video. Our HDCP compliant Dell 24in was the display panel of choice here. Audio was presented to us in 24bit 96kHz through our Creative X-Fi Elite Pro hardware.

We did note that playback, even current generation CPUs, couldn’t be totally offloaded to the GPU. Rather, we ended up with around a 15 to 19 per cent CPU utilisation between an AMD x2 4600+ system and an Intel Core2Duo E6550 system.

The unit came packaged with Cyberlink’s BD Solution, giving us an ‘all in one’ burning and playback installer. This was inclusive of the high definition enabled version of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 7.3.

We tested the physical playback speed of a Blu-ray disc and graphed the RPM, where we noted the drive going beyond the maximum 5x read speed for BD-ROM. Figure 1 shows a strange graduation of the read curve, suggesting that Blu-ray reading in itself has some fairly complex WOPC taking place at approximately 1GB intervals.

We tested the write quality of the device also, against some differing DVD media MID’s.

Apart from the parity spike near the 4.2GB point (which isn’t outside of specification), we were extremely pleased with the drive’s generic DVD write performance.

Ultimately, only the unit pricing will determine whether or not to buy it over its identical relative, the Pioneer BDC-202/S02. The ASUS BC-1205PT is a very capable unit, representing a step beyond the current HD-DVD add on for the XBOX-360/PC.