ASUS BC-1205Pt

With Asus’s BC-1205PT you get to read high-def discs, but only if they’re of the Blu-ray variety, so you’ll want to have a strong affinity for that format (and its affiliated movie studios) to take the plunge because while you do save money by forgoing the ability to write to Blu-ray, the BC-1205PT still isn’t cheap. Its a couple hundred dollars more than a high-performance standard DVD drive and its DVD burn performance is far from top-notch. The BC-1205PT is rated at 12x for DVD+/-R write speeds—a good deal slower than today’s top DVD burners, now at 20x, and not surprisingly, burn times take a hit. It took us 7:12 (min:sec) to fill a Single-layer DVD+R with the BC-1205PT, compared to the 5 minutes flat it took our favorite drive, Samsung’s SH-S203B (Reviewed October 2007) Burning to a double-layer DVD, the Asus drive maintained a 3.96x average speed and filled the disc in 27:09, more than twice the time it took our Samsung. Only when burning to DVD-RW media did the Asus and Samsung perform on par, writing 4.38GB to a single layer disc at 15:07 and 14:31, respectively. When reading data from all of our test discs, Asus’s drive had notably slower seek times than both the Samsung and the LG GCC-H20L reviewed here. Middling performance aside, the BC-1205PT offers a SATA interface, the CyberLink BD Solution suite for playback and burning chores, and a simple, black face plate.