Philips and Lite-On Digital Solutions have announced a strategic move on the pricing of the internal Lite-On Blu-ray Disc Drive LH-2B1S in Europe, bringing it down to €549 – around €100 below the current average market price.

With the launch of its LH-2B1S in November 2006, Lite-On was one of the first brands to offer a Blu-ray Disc writer to the market. Due to an early global shortage of the actual Blu-ray lasers, prices of Blu-ray writers remained high relative to alternative systems and pricing had not moved since these were introduced, says the company.

“Now that Blu-ray lasers are not in big shortage anymore and we have accumulated enough stock of the product, we can lower the price and still fulfill the growing demand,” says Katrin Ackermann, European sales
Manager for PLDS.

The LH-2B1S is sold in a retail box that includes a free SATA-cable and one BD-R disc. The drive can write BD media at 2X, while it also read and writes CD and DVD media. Blu-ray is the perfect solution for those who need high capacity optical storage capacity. A single layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 25GB of data, which is five times more then a DVD.

This product is planned for commercial launch later this year. Furthermore, a 4X BD Writer is on the roadmap.

Story filed 22.07.07