ASUS BC-08B1ST Blu-Ray Combo Drive Review :: The Drive

Box

Box rear

Drive packaging

Bundle

The drive comes in an attractive black box. The top left corner of the box has the ASUS Rock Solid, Heart Touching logo. The upper right corner has the Blu-ray Disc logo. The top center of the front has the name of the drive: BD Combo BC-08B1ST, along with the read and write speeds of the new drive. The back of the box has a description of the features of the drive in eight different languages.

Blu Ray Suite

Music

Data

utilities

The software suite that comes with this drive is based upon CyberLink's software suite. The ASUS drive comes with a Blu-ray Disc suite consisting of Cyberlink's Power DVD 7.3, InstantBurn, PowerBackup, Power2Go and ASUS's E-Green software. CyberLink's Power DVD software suite is one of the best DVD playback software on the market today. This should provide the user with great playback software for their new BD-ROM player.

True Theater High Definition allows the software to upscale the image from a 640 resolution to the 1080p resolution. This eliminates jagged edges and distracting video artifacts during playback of standard content on high-resolution displays. TrueTheater HD is the ideal solution for watching standard DVD movies with low resolution content in full-screen sizes on large displays using PowerDVD, Blu-ray/DVD playback software.

Blu-ray Disc advisor

Copy and Backup

PowerDVD BD Edition

Drive information

TrueTheater Motion enables frame rate upsampling to make scenes with a lot of motion play smoother. For example a movie like The Matrix which has a lot of action sequences would use TTM to smooth frame rates. TrueTheater Lighting is a video enhancement technology that dynamically adjusts the rightness/contrast/saturation ratios in scenes that are too bright or too dark. TrueTheater Stretch is a video stretching technology that produces minimal distortion in the middle of the picture. TrueTheater Surround is an audio channel expansion technology that converts stereo sound to a multiple channel format.