BenQ To Ship Blu-ray Burner By Year’s End

June 5, 2006 By Geoff Duncan

BenQ says it's preparing to ship a half-height Blu-ray disc burner by the end of 2006.

At a Taipei news conference today, BenQ CEO K.Y. Lee showed off a prototype half-height disk burner which can read and write Blu-ray disk as well as standard CD and DVD media. Lee said the company plans to ship the unit by the end of 2006. Lee declined to provide pricing information for the Blu-ray drive, noting that the eventual cost will be determined by the price of the drive’s read/write head.

Lee also said BenQ’s support for Blu-ray isn’t necessarily exclusive, although BenQ has supported Blu-ray over the competing HD DVD format. Lee noted he felt BenQ will probably have to support both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, and expects that future burners will be able to read and write both formats.

Showing 4 comments

Tim Stevens at 2:48pm 6th June 2006 I bet its just lack of content. Shouldnt they release content and players at the same time?
Diggbot at 9:43am 6th June 2006 Pioneer announced they are delaying their players till the fall today: http://news.digitaltrends.com/article10623.html

So it would be safe to assume that something is seriously going wrong here. Maybe they are trying to coordinate all of these with the PS3 launch?
Tim Stevens at 9:22am 6th June 2006 Does this mean that their burner also supports writing to cds & dvds or just reading? One burner to read/write Blu-ray, HD DVD, cd and dvd? Wow. I bet these things are $1000 when they first come out, just like DVD-RAM drives were. Did anyone ever use DVD-RAM?
Ian Bell and Dan Gaul at 11:00am 5th June 2006 Wow they sure were late with this. I wonder if Sony was holding them back?