LG had already developed a good reputation for itself with its DVD burners. They were reliable and provided good quality burns. It now continues this tradition with its new Blu-ray burner, the GBW-H10N.

The GBW-H10N offers some of the fastest reading and writing speeds for all the media formats, currently provided by a Blu-ray drive. It's only short fall is that it doesn't write Dual Layer Blu-ray discs.

As a reader, it proved to be very good with Blu-ray media. In contrast, there were some problems with the ABEX Single Layer DVD defects discs although it performed much better with the Dual Layer discs. But it was quite disappointing in our CD Error Correction tests and appears to be a less than average reader with problem CDs.

As a burner, it successfully burned our BD-R and BD-RE media. It provided very nice burns with TDK Blu-ray media (TDKBLDRBA-(000) BD-R) with burning and reading speeds of 4X. With Verbatim BD-R media (Verbatima (000)) however, although it successfully burned and read the disc, it could only manage a burning speed of 1.32X, requiring 68 minutes to complete. We imagine that this is something to be addressed in a future firmware release. With CD media, Taiyo Yuden Professional media was awarded an A Grading by the Clover Systems Test System.

With DVD media, while most discs produced good results, there was especially good quality with MAXELL 003, OPTODISC OR4, PRODISC R04, YUDEN000 T02 and YUDEN000 T03 for DVD+R, and CMC MAG AE1, DAXON016S, INFODISC-R20, ProdsicF01, RITEKF1 and RITEKG05 for DVD-R. Furthermore, MAXELL 003 (000) media was burned at 12X although the media is rated at 8X.

Good quality writing was also present with RW media. The drive also writes and reads DVD-RAM at a maximum speed of 5X.

Unfortunately, we were unable to test the drive as a Blu-Ray movie player, since as yet, no releases have been forthcoming in the European region. But the drive is only one link in the chain of devices required to play a HD title. As is widely discussed over the internet, in order to play HD content titles, a compatible HDCP monitor or HDMI TV set is required as well as an appropriate graphics card (HDCP) and the latest Nvidia or ATI drivers.

Generally, this proved a very good drive with the only dark cloud being CD error correction and to a lesser extent, DVD error correction, and the inability to burn Dual Layer Blue-ray media. At a price of around €650 - €700, it is still an expensive option for most pockets, but for those who can afford it, it is a good choice if you don't need to burn Dual Layer Blu-ray media.