Tested: LG's New Super Multi Blue BD Drive/HD DVD Reader

LG has already released its Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD player for home theater use. Now, the company's combo drive for PCs is a reality, too. The LG GGW-H10NI Super Multi Blue BD Drive/HD DVD Reader can write to 25GB single- and 50GB double-layer Blu-ray Disc media (write-once and rewritable).

The drive boasts some impressive spec ratings: 4X for BD-R single-layer write speed; 2X for BD-R double-layer, and BD-RE (rewritable) single- and double-layer; 8X for DVD-R/+R; 4X DVD-R/+R double-layer; and 16X for CD-R/RW. And it's big hook, of course, is that in addition to reading and writing Blu-ray Discs, it can also play HD DVD-ROMs, including all of the Hollywood HD DVD movies now shipping. But you'll pay dearly for the convenience of having these competing next-gen formats in one drive: LG says the drive's list price is $1199.

The PC World Test Center got its hands on one of the first shipping units, and ran it through some tests today using 2X TDK BD-R single-layer media. Although LG's drive is capable of 4X BD-R writes, only 2X media is available now--and I hear from media manufacturers that we won't see 4X BD-R media until mid-to-late third quarter.

Our first test results confirm that this drive performs as we've come to expect for a 2X Blu-ray Disc writer: The drive required 44 minutes, 14 seconds to write 22GB of files and folders to BD-R using CyberLink's Power2Go (included with the drive). That result is in line with what we've seen for other internal Blu-ray burners we've tested on the same test bed using the same data set: Plextor's PX-B900A required 44 minutes, 35 seconds; Sony's BWU-100A required 44 minutes, 38 seconds; and Pioneer's BDR-101A required 44 minutes, 45 seconds. The result also nearly matches what we saw from the drive on Hewlett-Packard's pre-production PC introduced early this week; HP was the first PC maker to announce its intentions to use LG's drive in its systems.

LG says it will ship the drives to retail stores in June. Stay tuned for our full review next week.