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The arrival of Adobe Encore CS3 and its Blu-ray authoring capabilities will create a lot of interest in Blu-ray authoring. To produce Blu-ray Discs, of course, you'll need a recorder, and because Blu-ray recorders are new and rare creatures, we thought we'd take a look at the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive ($839, direct). The category is very new, so I'll identify the questions you should ask when buying a Blu-ray recorder and then answer them using details from the LaCie drive.
About the hardware
Let's start by looking at the hardware. Your first question should always be, "Who's the drive manufacturer?" because very few vendors actually produce the drive mechanism itself. In the case of LaCie, it's a Matshita drive (short for Matsushita, the company that owns the Panasonic brand). In essence, this means that LaCie provides the case and bundled software, but the drive - which, to a great degree, determines both performance and compatibility - comes from Matshita.
Surprisingly, "single- or dual-layer" should be your next concern. Some of the early Blu-ray burners, including the Pioneer BDR-101A, produce only single-layer discs, or 25GB of data. While this is adequate for close to 2 hours of high-quality, high-definition video, it's definitely sub-optimal for data backups. At this point, there are plenty of good dual-layer drives available, so a single-layer solution is certainly less than ideal.
The next question for me is always, "Internal or external?" Like most video producers, I have multiple computers, both Mac and Windows, and I produce on both. Having an internal drive is doable, but an external drive, such as the LaCie, is much more convenient. I also like that the LaCie supports both FireWire and USB 2.0 connectors, which doubles my chances of being able to connect on the front of my desktop computers.
If you're buying a drive to serve as the single drive for a system, you'll want to know which formats the drive can record, although this is getting more uniform. For example, like most current Blu-ray drives, the LaCie can write to both BD-R and BD-RE at 2X speeds, and it is backward compatible with both DVD and CD. Note that while "1X" for CD-ROMs is 150KBps and "1X" for DVDs is 1.35MBps, "1X"...