WE ALL SAW the HD DVD Vs Blu-ray battle with the lat¬ter emerging on top. At least until the next big fight comes along. In a nutshell, what this means is 25GB storage in a single layer Blu-ray disc as opposed to 4.7GB with DVDs. And yes, full HD reso¬lution for us to relish digital movies like never before. In the coming months, we are set to see many Blu-ray GGW-H20L I LG Blu-ray technology brings several goodies, but currently expensive. Price: Rs. 20,000 ROMs and writers. One of the first Blu-ray drivers in India, the LG GGW-H20L made it to our labs.

In our tests, the time taken to fill the 25GB single layer disc to capacity was 91 minutes at 1x speed. At 2x you can expect the writing time to reduce by half- 45 minutes. How does this compare to DVDs? You need over 30 minutes to burn six DVDs (the number required to hold the same amount of data). If Blu-ray drives and media are 4x capable, the time taken to write a 25GB Blu-ray disk will reduce to a mere 23 minutes, certainly faster zable shortcut key, the but¬ton placement is conve¬nient and scores high on ergonomics. Its interface is responsive with a simple menu navigation system. The Creative Media Lite application set up in the player can be used for transferring songs, ripping CDs and updating firm¬ware. Transferring over 500MB of songs took only 4 minutes.

We found the bundled headphones accentuated only the middle frequencies leaving the rest behind.It lacked deep lows when com¬pared with Cowon range of MP3 players but this won't be much of an issue unless you are a bass freak. The four Equalizer presets and one user customizable setting give you flexibility to tweak the sound. Its record¬er worked well at close range, and the FM radio gave good reception. The built-in battery gets charged while connected to a PC and it lasted us between six and seven hours against the claimed nine hours. For Rs 3, 399/-, the MuvoT200 offers thumb drive function¬ality with a well-balanced portable audio player.

Name: The LG GGW-H20L HD-DVD.jpg Views: 2792 Size: 11.3 KB

A slim portable audio player with multiple features and decent per¬formance.
Price: Rs.3,399 This LG can read HD¬DVDs as well, and otherwise function as a DVD writer that can write and read all DVD formats. We tested DVD writing speeds on Moser Baer and HP media. In both cases, the time taken was close to six minutes, a little below average.

This drive is the first of many more to come - both from LG and other manufac¬turers. At the time of this review, there were only a handful of Blu-ray movie titles available and prices of drives are sure to drop. You would do well to wait for prices to come down before taking the Blu route.