Blu-ray burners remain prohibitively expensive, just as their forebears - DVD burners, and before that CD burners - were during their formative years. At the time of writing the cheapest Blu-ray burner I could find was listed at over $500, while the bulk...

In operation the drive is very quiet and offers excellent read speeds across the formats. The only noticeable weakness is in CD read speeds (32x), but the only real-world impact this is likely to have on your day-to-day operations is in the amount of time...

Lite-On has been producing EZDub-branded products for years now. EZDub is a range of external DVD burners that aim to take some of the hassle out of burning and duplicating discs. At the push of a button even a novice user can make an exact copy of a CD o...

Lite-On has been producing EZDub-branded products for years now. EZDub is a range of external DVD burners that aim to take some of the hassle out of burning and duplicating discs. At the push of a button even a novice user can make an exact copy of a CD o...

High-definition disc players After much bluster and a few false starts, high-­definition DVD has arrived. Unfortunately, high-def DVD comes in two incompatible formats - Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD - and the formats' supporters have not resolved their differe

A more important issue is disc capacity. Both formats offer capacities several times that of conventional DVDs. At launch, Blu-ray Disc is available in 25GB single-layer and 50GB dual-layer flavours (for pre-packaged media as well as for recordable and re...

Internal DVD-writer We're used to seeing lots of OEM drives here at PC World. These are the ones that come without software, installation kits, instructions and so on. So the Sony DRU-810A, which comes in a full retail package, makes a nice change - and w...

For a start, the instructions are expansive. From the whistle-stop tour of the software suite to the quick-start installation guide, they are very in-depth

USB 2.0 is rightly designated as a Hi-Speed interface. Iomega's new external Predator CD-RW drive takes advantage of its bandwidth to catch up with Firewire and IDE devices for hot burn times

Unfortunately, USB 2.0 still isn't common amongst ports on most PCs, so you'll probably need to install a PCI card to get the rated 24x10x40x performance (the Predator is backwards compatible with USB 1.1 ports for much slower data transfers of 4x4x6x). I...