I am about to purchase a Sony Blu Ray external DVD Read/Write Drive, my questions are with the price of the Blu Ray discs would I be better off to wait another year? Does anyone here burn via Blu Ray and if so do you find it to be worth it? I see many different companies make the Blu Ray discs but Im not sure who is reliable and makes high quality discs. I have a PS3 and love the Blu Ray dvd feature. I have a few Movies on Blu Ray and the quality is fantastic, but they cost (in most cases) almost $40 dollars per dvd. I would really like to get some thoughts on whether it would be cheaper to burn my own Blu Ray or keep buying them from the store. Id also like some thoughts on the "up converting" dvd players out. Id like to hear from some members who have some expirence in this area. Thanks

Moved to the CD Freaks Blu-ray Hardware section.

Those are some tough questions...

First, which Sony model? I don't think Sony made an external blu-ray burner, unless I missed something.

You can wait another year or two but today is the 3rd year for Blu-ray and prices dropped tremendously from $1000-1200 last year for a burner (LG GBW/GGW-H10L) to around $250 now (LG GGW-H20L at newegg). Blank disc also dropped from $30 to less than $10. If you shop wisely you can get those price online, ebay, or instore during sale.

Similarly, standalone price also dropped more than half from >$1000 last year (IMO mainly due to the war with HD DVD).

Personally I never buy blu-ray movies at MSRP $40. If you shop carefully you can get cheaper by buying online. Amazon hardly sell new movies for MSRP price, even the upcoming Transformers 2 Disc Special Edition or Iron Man (both preorder) is $27.95 each. http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Man-Speci...ductPromotions

Regarding your question whether it's worth it to backup Blu-ray movies: In general I would say No, I don't think it worth the trouble. Backing up Blu-ray is not as easy, fast and as cheap as backing up DVD. However, many of us here do it just for fun. Also some colleagues I know use Blu-ray burner for other things such as burning home movies (eq. from HD camcorder), burning HD DVR from cable, etc.

Regarding upconverting DVD, Blu-ray player will upconvert dvd too.
But if you question how good is the same movie title on Blu-ray vs DVD upconverted, my asnwer will be: depends on the size of your HDTV and your sound system equipment. If your TV is large (on average 42" or higher) you will see the difference in the picture quality. But if your TV is not so large (32" or less) then the difference will not be significant enough although you should see much richer video. Also Blu-ray offers high definition sound which exceed DVD (eq LPCM, DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD), that if you have sound system that can handle them.

https://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs...52921665232922

This is the only one they are showing now on the site, but it is the same one I was looking at. Only not refurb.

That's an internal Blu-ray burner, not external.

You're right. That is so strange because when I looked it up b4 it was said to be external.........hmmmmmmm

If you're looking for external Blu-ray burner, some of the available choices are from Lacie, Buffalo, Samsung and LG. But in the US only Lacie D2 is available and some custom made external drive (internal drive + third party external case.)

The Lacie d2: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11054

Or you can wait for LG BE06 which will be available very soon: http://club.cdfreaks.com/f142/lg-gbw...drives-246246/