Optical Drive

Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology (TSST), the joint venture between the two named firms that manufactures optical drives, is no longer making them according to sources familiar with the matter. This has left some third parties purportedly low on stock and could mean just LG and Liteon are the remaining ODD …

The Blu-ray disc association on Wednesday announced that it plans to begin licensing its Ultra HD Blu-ray format on the 24th of August. The set of technologies will allow makers of players, receivers and other electronics as well as designers of various audio/video (AV) processors to create hardware compatible with Ultra …

Taiyo Yuden may not be a familiar name outside of Japan, but it is one of the world’s largest makers of optical recording media. Rebranded Taiyo Yuden products can be found under Fujifilm, Maxell, Panasonic, Plextor, TDK, Verbatim and other brands. This week the company announced that it will cease …

After Blu-ray disc association this week finalized the Ultra HD Blu-ray specifications, industry watchers believe that the new players and discs will show up on the market by the end of the year. Panasonic expects new UHD BD hardware to cost two or three times higher compared to current players initially, whereas …

The Blu-ray disc association (BDA) this week said it had completed development of the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification and released the new logo. The upcoming technology will enable delivery of video content in up to 3840*2160 resolution using optical discs. The first Ultra HD Blu-ray (UHD BD) movies and players …

The Blu-ray disc association (BDA) has been working on a new BD specification that supports ultra-high-definition (UHD) 4K resolution for about a year now. Apparently, the organization is on-track with formal announcement of Ultra HD Blu-ray disc standard in the second quarter of 2015, according to a media report. The …

Sony and Panasonic on Monday introduced their new jointly-developed optical disc format called Archival Disc that allows to store from 300GB to 1TB of data on a single 120mm disc. Both Sony and Panasonic aim to launch systems with a recording capacity of 300GB per disc in summer 2015. Initially, …

The Blu-ray disc association (BDA), the organization responsible for setting up Blu-ray standards, has confirmed that the work on a specification of Blu-ray disc for ultra-high-definition (UHD) video had begun. While representatives for the BDA did not reveal any actual details, they confirmed that the new standard will feature a …

Even though video streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix are growing rapidly these days, the majority of consumers still prefer movies on good-old optical media, such as Blu-ray disc (BD) and DVD. As a result, sales of Blu-ray movies hit another record last December in the USA. A recent …

With the progress that services like Steam, Origin and Netflix are making these days, many think that packaged media is a thing of the past. Despite this, they continue to play an important role in the industry, but not so much that Microsoft didn't consider removing the optical disc drive …

Following on from KitGuru's revelation that Asus has launched the Essence One audiophile amp at CeBIT 2011, we've now spotted a pair of full-spec Blu-ray players. Does this mark the beginning of a sustained Asus-assault on the living room?   You be the judge. OK, so you'd expect a Blu-ray player …

Blu Ray writers are finally starting to come down in price and today we are reviewing the Plextor PX-B940SA drive. Plextor have been producing some of the finest drives on the market for the last decade and their optic quality has always been a primary selling point. With HD-DVD resigned …

Optical drive sales have slowed down considerably in 2010, as many people opt for USB and networking for media storage and transfer. In a move to help counter this, Hitachi-LG have been working on new optical Hybrid drives which combine and optical disk drive and SSD in a single enclosure. …

If, like me you rarely use an internal optical drive now in any of your system builds, then the product we are looking at today will be of particular interest. The Asus Extreme Slim DVD-RW Drive is only 14mm thick and takes all its power from the USB ports – …

At KitGuru we review a plethora of different products but it's not often that we look at things like optical drives which are reasonably homogeneous in design and don't differ greatly in terms of performance. Today we are going to look at LiteOn's latest external DVD/CD writer, the eTAU108, which …