Blu-Ray quality discs and burner

[zurst]

Hi, I'm thinking about a Blu-ray burner and the best cost-effective blu-ray discs, any recommendations?

I read LTH Blu-ray discs have less quality and are not suitable for storing data, the good ones seems to be HTL. And last but not least, where to buy them? :)

Regards

[piercerseth]

Good old Verbatim non-LTH SKUs here. (http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/blu-ray/bd-r/show-products/)

Try Amazon.

[zurst]

Good old Verbatim non-LTH SKUs here. (http://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/blu-ray/bd-r/show-products/)

Try Amazon.

Thank you mate :)

Regards

[megabyteme]

Hi, I'm thinking about a Blu-ray burner and the best cost-effective blu-ray discs, any recommendations?

I read LTH Blu-ray discs have less quality and are not suitable for storing data, the good ones seems to be HTL. And last but not least, where to buy them? :)

Regards

It has been quite some time since I burned anything to disc since networking my house and streaming. However, when I was burning discs, I always read the reviews on Newegg. It takes a bit of reading, but there are members there who not only burn a lot of discs, but who do A LOT of research. They know what brands are using discs made by which manufacturer. Not only can you save yourself heartache of failed burns, you can also get some premium quality discs at bulk pricing. There are only a handful of OEM manufacturers. Everyone else rebrands these discs. They are all marked on their hubs. Don't buy by the label unless you know where that particular cake box came from originally.

Hope this makes sense. TL;DR- Read reviews on Newegg. Smart consumers know who actually manufactured the discs in each unit- these guys like to research and spread the word. Save yourself time and money by knowing what you are actually getting.

[huejardon]

I have a Lite-on Blueray burner. I have it about 2 years but I've not used it that much. The Disks are quite expensive. I do have a few rewritable ones I use for back ups

[RVB]

BrD are still so expensive right now...

[Beck38]

25GB Bluray inkjet printable discs are <70cents each at several web sellers. Cheaper than blank DVD9's! Double-layer BD's (50GB) are still >$4/ea though.

I have 2 Pioneer blu burners, have been working great for several years, the price on them (look at Newegg) is now well below $100 (when I bought them they were >$200, but the first 'DVD' burner I bought was >$300).

But it's all relative. I have over 10K burned DVD5's, and just over 1K burned BD25's, and burn some 2-3 BD25's a week.

[stangvert]

I use an older LG player burner and it has worked perfectly for the last several years. I mainly buy the 25GB discs, whatever is on sale.

[Beck38]

Been a while as to this thread (in particular blank bluray prices) but this last year had to move (cost of living and rising local taxes), but in the meantime the cost of blank blurays dual-layer (50gb) have really taken a tumble.

Amazon lists ridata inkjet hub printable at around $1.80/ea 'prime' shipping (25 cake pack).

That's just a bit over 25cents more than doing things 'split' (movie on one disc recoded mkv another for extras).

Will be trying this methodology out in the next few weeks. Big difference is no huge amount of time (~24hrs on a fast cpu machine recoding movie down to 25gb) and no trimming of audio tracks as well.

Will be interesting.

[Beck38]

Other than the DL Bluray blanks, another piece of 'tech' already here (but at elevated prices for now) are multi-layer (beyond 2, like 3 and 4, 75G/100G) BDXL discs, and the burners/players that support them (it's what's being used for these '4k' discs).

Most disc suppliers have one or two in their lineup, other than LG which seems to have gone whole hog for the format. The burners themselves are between $75-125, but the blank discs are in the range of what the BD-DL's were a year or two back, $4-6+.

For those looking for a 'stand-alone' player that supports both MKV/PGS on both optical and networks, the Oppo's are really the only choice as most of the optical/network devices of the past (PCH/Popcorn Hour, Dune, and others) have gone the route of making smaller and smaller STB's (set top boxes) the size of paperback books sans internal optical drives, figuring that if folks want that capability, they'll pay for it with an external device (USB3 or dual-USB2 or in one case a eSATA port) but those drives are few and far between, and about as expensive as the basic box they attach to.

For those into large scale NAS boxes, though, the cost per MB continues to drop. For what I paid 5 years ago for something in the 20-25TB range I can now replicate at the same dollars but with well over 80TB of storage (both the cost per 'slot' of HD space AND the cost/performance/datastorage of the drives has all conspired to drive the price down.

FYI, the price of the OPPO base level player is $499, although they are supposed to be working on a 4K box for release by the end of 2016. Personally, even though I own a 4K display (with HDR colorspace) it isn't OLED but LED (less than half the price of a comperable OLED set) and although it is nicer than my older (2012) plasma, it isn't THAT much better as the amount of 4K/HDR material is pretty slim.

In short, I'll wait for 8K, sans glasses 3D.