UnBox 16 – Feeling Blu

Part of the beauty of the MyMac Unbox is our readers sharing the joy of discovery and sense of wonder as we uncover together the latest item sent to one of the MyMac corporate Hubs. However, occasionally events conspire to reveal the contents of these coffers before they actually arrive, and this is one of those times – I know what is inside. However, I see no reason to spoil your own sense of mystery, Gentle Reader, so if you are settled in to the edge of your seat – on with the pictures

Check out all of that paperwork and stickerage! That’s international shipping for you. As a matter of fact, the reason I know what the contents of the box are is because of a screw up by UPS, requiring me to resolve the situation with the sender – who, as that tape suggests, is our good friend and sponsor Other World Computing.

A Mercury Pro optical drive. This is a good example of the high level of Other World Computing’s service. They sell quality 5.25 inch drive enclosures and bare optical drives, but also offer them as a fully warranted completely assembled product for the less technically inclined. And check out that logo in the middle of the drive tray – the Blu-ray symbol!

Glad they included all of the cables – as it is a four-interface enclosure (both types of FireWire, USB and eSATA) that is a nice touch. The enclosure is extremely well put together, and quite attractive for this sort of thing. And, as the drive’s OEM manual states, this is a full dual layer Blu-Ray rewriter! Cool!

Two single-layer Blu-ray recordables are bundled in, which is a nice touch, given the low availability and high price of this media at present. Even a single-layer disk can take 25Gb of data, and the drive will burn at up to 6x speed. Of course, full DVD and CDRW support is also offered, as well as HD-DVD reading (yeah, right… good luck finding one of those!).

Now, there are a few caveats with this, as full Blu-ray support is not yet available in OS X. Firstly, don’t go thinking you can stick “The Dark Knight” in here and start watching The Joker get a Christian Bale smackdown – no video support is available for Blu-ray at all under Apple (as Steve Jobs so eloquently pointed out at the release of the newest laptops, the licensing is a “bag of hurt”) and while with the right software you might get a disk to play under Windows with Boot Camp, unless your machine is one of the new Unibody laptops you won’t have HDCP support and so won’t get an HD picture (thanks, MPAA goons). For Blu-ray writing, you need Toast Titanium with the HD plugin – OWC offers a version of the drive bundled with Toast, if you don’t already have it.

Hit up http://www.macsales.com for more.
This particular model goes for $450 at present.

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