Cheapest available blu ray drives(?)

[Workaholic]

Just out of curiousity (and because I'm sure I read somewhere that these drives won't be too expensive) I was wondering if any of you lot have stumbled accross any retailers selling blu ray drives for the PC?

So far.......

Play.com
http://www.play.com/Electronics/Elec...r/Product.html
Pioneer BDR-101A - £629.99
Supposedly only supports up to 25GB discs......

and surprising cheaper at Maplin
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?...16m8&source=15
LG unknown model - £599.99
according to the information on the page, it only READS the blu ray discs with a capacity of up to 50GB..... (but I'm sure it should say burns it at that price..)
Also supports DVD-RAM (which I thought are out of phrase / hardly used anyway...)

[nichomach]

Pioneer are first to market with a Blu Ray device, and it DOESN'T burn 50GB disks. See http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08...neer_bdr-101a/ for details. It's got TERRIBLE performance writing standard DVDs, will only write up to 25GB, and is VERY expensive. The LG I don't know about, but I wouldn't necessarily be overly shocked if it DID only read BluRay.

[Funkstar]

The pioneer is normally £528.74 at Scan, but is down to £504.08 on this weekends TodayOnly

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/produ...oductID=459412

[Nick F]

You would be crazy to buy anything like this at the moment, although I doubt people have already taken the plunge

[Funkstar]

agree about the crazy part, but the even crazier thing is that they are probably selling quite a lot of these considdering the price. Some corporates will snap this up for the ability to archive 25GB per disk. Media companies will want to get a head start with authoring and testing of any HiDef content they have too.

I would guess that they will really take off when they hit the third generation drives.