Buffalo has announced what it claims to be the market’s fastest internal Blu-ray burner in the form of Buffalo BR-816FBS, specified to burn Blu-ray media at 8x speed, something no other internal drive can do today. The burner comes with 8MB memory buffer and can also burn DVD discs at 16x speed and CDs at 48x speed. If you want to burn dual-layer BD-R media you have to settle for 2x speed though.
When Buffalo BR-816FBS, or any other 8x drive, will reach the stores here in Europe or America remains to be seen but it might be a bigger problem finding media that lives up to the potential of the drive. You can find 4x media in stores today, but they cost nearly $10-15 apiece.
The question is if it’s worth the effort to jump on to the Blu-ray train for the home user, just the burner, Buffalo BR-816FBS, will cost around $350. We’re seeing a rapid development on the Blu-ray market in terms of write speeds, but just like the DVD market it seems to the media that is the bottleneck, not the burners.
