Now that HD DVD has thrown in the towel, consumers can feel confident that their Blu-ray drives won't suffer the same fate as Betamax players did back in the 1980s. Enter Sony's BDU-X10S Blu-ray Disc-ROM (BD-ROM) drive, a reasonably priced internal drive that lets you watch high-definition movies on your PC. Unfortunately, that's about all you can do, since this drive does not record Blu-ray or DVD media. Still it's a good choice as a second drive for a multimedia or home-theater PC build.
The BDU-X10S has a plain black bezel that sports the Sony and Blu-ray logos as well as a green activity light. Everything you'll need to install the drive is in the box, including a Serial ATA (SATA) cable and SATA power adapter, mounting screws, and a quick-start guide. Sony even throws in a replacement loading tray cover kit in case the original cover is too big for your PC. The drive also comes with a CD containing Cyberlink's PowerDVD 7.3 Blu-ray Disc software player applet and an electronic user manual.
The drive requires at least a 3.4GHz Pentium D processor to operate correctly, and Sony recommends a 2.4GHz Core Duo or higher for optimal performance. Other requirements include at least 512MB of memory, a High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)-compliant display to view protected Blu-ray content, a 256MB graphics engine with HDCP support, and any version of Windows Vista or Windows XP with SP2. The BDU-X10S reads CD media at 24x and DVD media at 8x, but Blu-ray media is still limited to 2x read speeds.
Once you've cracked the case on your PC, installation is a snap. The BDU-X10S can be installed vertically or horizontally depending on your chassis configuration. Simply slide the drive into an open bay, attach the SATA cable and SATA power cable, secure the drive with screws, and button up the case. It took less than five minutes to install the drive on a Windows Vista Home Premium system, and Windows recognized the device immediately. Next, we installed the Cyberlink player software to see how the Blu-ray version of BBC Video's Planet Earth looked in high definition.
Cyberlink's PowerDVD player has always been one of the most popular and user-friendly DVD player applications out there, and the 7.3 Blu-ray Disc version contains a few new features, including support for MPEG-4 high-definition video and a variety of DTS and AAC audio standards. Watching the Planet Earth Blu-ray Disc on a typical 22-inch wide-screen desktop display (via the HDMI port) was a treat. The BDU-X10S did an outstanding job of playing stutter-free video and, as expected, the HD content looked awesome. Audio and video were perfectly in sync as well. We then hooked our system up to a 47-inch HDTV and were again mostly impressed with image quality. While the picture was not quite as crisp as we've seen using a dedicated set-top Blu-ray player with the same LCD panel, the overall experience was still quite good.
Until software vendors begin offering their programs on high-capacity Blu-ray media, the only reason to pop a BD-ROM drive into your PC is to watch Blu-ray movies. To that end, the Sony BDU-X10s will certainly get the job done. But if you're looking for a Blu-ray burner such as Sony's BWU-100a, you'll have to part with a much larger chunk of change.
