LITE-ON Black 4X BD-R 2X BD-RE 12X DVD+R 4X BD-ROM SATA 4X Blu-ray Burner DH-4B1S-08

Pros: It does what it says, kinda,, for now.

Cons: Here we go:
1. Its reallllyyy slow. Slow to boot and burn.
2. Its excessively lowed
3. Inconsistent burning speed regardless of media
4. WAY too expensive for the over all performance!
5. BD that do come out of this thing do NOT look like BD's
I do admit that they look better than DVD's but not as
good as I would expect.

Other Thoughts: As time goes by, prices go down and quality+performance go up. I am sending mine back and waiting for a few months while they work the bugs out.

minus 2 eggs for its price/performance

Pros: I purchased this unit because of all the features, and the numerious things that it was capable of preforming.

Cons: I have had this unit for three months and as of now I still have not got the Blue Ray portion of this burner to work. It does work when playing a CD or DVD.

Other Thoughts: As I continue to study on this problem some of this may be caused by some of the perferials that I have used to go along with this Burner. Too much time has gone by for me to RMA the unit so thats all there is to say.

Pros: Supposed to read and write CD's, DVD's and Blu-ray disks.

Cons: This drive, after nine months has quit reading CD's, DVD's and Blu-ray movies. Essentially it has died.

Pros: It's a solid drive. I've never had problems burning CD's, DVD's or Blu-ray discs (25G or 50G, BDR or BDRE).

Cons: That light bar below the drive lights up in different colors, and it is very bright and annoying. It lights up the whole room at night. I've never seen an optical drive do something like that. Unless that is what you are specifically looking for, I would recommend any other BD drive with more subtle design. You'll either love it or hate it.

Other Thoughts: Not a bad drive. Good support as always from Lite-on with firmwares. Just really disappointed in the design.

Pros: Burns and plays BD (barely just what I expected though). What else is there to say?
Came with latest firmware and powerdvd.
25GB capacity is good for data backup.

A decent value but...

Cons: Shoulda gone with the LG.. Similar price but better as follows:
Only 4x compared to 6x
Single layer (25GB) support only, compared to dual layer (50GB)

$6 per disk!!

Other Thoughts: All I have to say it that HDCP and DRM in general is a PITA!! Had to install powerdvd plus 3 updates (about an hour to download and install) before it will play anything. Took about 3 minutes to start playing BD (my computer was frozen for the 3 minutes). Same thing happened multiple times. It's funny how when you illegXlly download a movie, it always works well, fast, simple, easy... But when you spend a ton of cash on a BD drive and disks, nothing works!!! (I don't download anymore by the way, I want to support the industry).

I would recommend waiting a few months to spring for one of these, until the tech gets a bit better and DRM issues are worked out. Until then, watch your movies on your fanastic PS3!

Pros: A very solid performer in audio and video quality. It does what it says. Of course, your hardware and software has to be Blu Ray capable.

Cons: Lite On SATA model DH - 4B1S - 08 Windows driver issues (solved)

According to Intel, the SATA controller has three modes of operation:
1) IDE mode - no AHCI, no RAID
2) SATA mode (also called AHCI mode) - AHCI enabled, no RAID
3) RAID mode - AHCI enabled, RAID enabled
NOTE: Your mainboard may not have all the three options.

In bios, when setting the SATA controller is important to understand:
An IDE mode device uses a different driver than SATA and RAID mode device.
The Lite On 4B1S - 08 is an IDE mode device and uses a native Microsoft driver.
My driver files: .../cdrom.sys (Microsoft), and .../clbstor.sys (Cyberlink).

Other Thoughts: The Microsoft advice did not work for me: To manually delete the registry entries, go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Class.
Select the folder 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318
Look for UpperFilters and/or LowerFilters. Remove those entrees.
Once removed, there should be 8 entrees on the right side.
Restart computer. DONE DEAL (my .../clbstor.sys was gone)!

Pros: I don't own the drive, but I wanted to add a note to the Reviewer who talked about the HDCP.

This is not a limitation of the drive. Your system must be fully HDCP capable to watch blu-ray movies. Not just HDCP-Ready. Usually that means you need to add something, be it a firmware or a chip. Your Drive, Videocard and Driver, as well as Monitor all have to be fully HDCP capable for Blu-Ray video to play properly.

Cons: .

Pros: It spins up and plays Blue Ray DVD’s and the software it easy to use if it loads right.
This is my third LiteOn DVD drive and the two before it were great drives which work well to this day.

Cons: The digital right management is very restrictive and slows everything down when you can get it to run. The patch I was directed to on the LiteOn web site would not flash the firmware and the patch for Cyberlink Power DVD took several tries to get it to work and had some errors no matter what I did.

Other Thoughts: This Blu-ray drive would have been fine if it didn’t have HDCP digital rights management which my computer lacked. My brother bought a drive like this and it worked just fine for him but his computer was built three months ago. I have and ATI X1600 pro video card and although it is HDCP ready it falls short of satisfying the firmware and software that came with the drive. The result was that it would start playing a movie and would halt about ten seconds into it, then I would get a prompt to upgrade the software drivers or the video card drivers. It would play fine in analog but in that case the quality was not much different the regular DVD play back. If you are starting off with a new HDCP compliant PC this might be fine but if you are running an AGP type mother board and AGP video card it might not work at
all.

If you want to know more you can read the HDCP articles on Toms Hardware, they pretty much explain it all.

Intel P-4 3.2 GHz, 4 Gig Ram, ATI X1600 Pro, Soyo Dragon S

Pros: Reads CDs & DVDs just fine. I never tested Blu-Ray discs; can't report on that.

Cons: It won't burn CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray discs under Windows using the standard software; you must install the included software. More importantly, for me, is that it won't burn, period, under linux. The company doesn't support it and the linux disc-burning software (wodim) dies why you attempt to use it.

Perhaps this will be fixed in the future, but for 2008/7, it's a non-starter for linux.

Pros: cheapest 4x blu ray burner available here

Cons: however newegg offers the LG external BluRay burner that burns at 6x and offers more features (ex: hd dvd rom, burning of Dual Layer BluRay disk). Even the dvd burning speeds are faster.

Other Thoughts: With LG's release of the above bluray burner (BE06LU10) they also released an internal drive (GGW-H20L). i am going to hold out to see if newegg picks this model up. I wanted to buy the fastest bluray on the market to match my Sony HD camcorder, but I find myself waiting now. Oh in preperation to purchase this unit I called Lite On support, this drive will work on Vista 64bit, but the user must have a HDCP compatible Video Card & Monitor. Perhaps that was the other users issue.
As always, you can gmail my nickname anytime