Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

None of the modern Macs ship with Blu-ray writers which is incredibly frustrating for video editors/camera people, especially those shooting to tapeless formats. What we need is a reliable and affordable way to archive our media. Hard drives are great to edit with, but for long-term archiving (meaning several decades) we need an optical media solution.

Blu-ray promises to be the solution we have been looking for - however, most of the Blu-ray solution are not Mac compatible - at least according to the specs. published by the manufacturers.

In this report we take a Blu-ray writer, specified to work with Windows XP or Vista, and plug it into a Mac to see what happens.

The results are not only surprising but inspiring. We now have that archiving solution we have been looking for. And with the cost of Blu-ray media more affordable than ever the long-term optical media solution is affordable, available and ready for anyone ready to leap towards this new way of working.

Verdict

The LG BE06 is a breakthrough product for video editors. Simply put, it works! It let's you burn 25 or 50GB Blu-ray media from a Mac for archiving purposes. Unfortunately this product, on the Mac platform, is a one-trick-pony. One cannot use it for viewing Blu-ray discs (as can be done on a PC) - it can only be used to burn data to Blu-ray media. However, that is good enough for the requirements of what the Mac editing community needs. It may only do one trick but it does it very well. I would not be without one!