The LiteOn iHBS112 is among the fastest BD burners currently available. The supported 12x burning speed is fast enough to offer you a complete 25GB disc in less than 11 minutes - a record that would sound unrealistic if you asked us a couple of years ago when we tested the first 2x BD burners.

The drive is compatible with all the optical media formats - CD, DVD and BD. As a result, it could replace your current CD/ DVD burner and bring the Blu-ray disc experience to your desktop, in terms of both data storage and HD entertainment. Priced at €150, the iHBS112 could be addressed to a wider part of the market, which expands beyond the enthusiasts' segment.

Let's move on to our findings now. As a general comment, we think that the firmware installed in our sample drive is not mature enough to help the drive unveil its full potential. Specifically, the drive burned many CD-R at 32x instead of the 48x and some popular DVD recordables at 8x and not at the maximum supported 16x speed. The quality of these burns was a mixed bag: In some cases the quality of the recordings was high, while in some other cases we measured surprisingly low quality even from generally high-quality DVD media. For example, the drive had some bad burns with the Verbatim CD-RW disc at 24x and the Taiyo Yuden DVD+R burned at just 8x. We also saw some writing quality problems with the Verbatim DVD+R DL discs at 8x.

Other than that and regarding the reading aspect of the drive, we have to say that it turned out to be pretty good and all the CD and DVD disc were read at speeds that agree with the drive's specifications. Most reading processes were nice producing smooth graphs. As far as error correction is concerned, we can say that the drive can handle defective CD and DVD media pretty well.

Moving to the Blu-ray performance, the impression remains the same: The drive will burn at the maximum 12x speed in very specific BD-R SL media. In most cases the BD-R SL media (6x-certified) we used were burned at 6x or slower. The same applies to BD-R DL media.

We also tried to measure the writing quality of the BD recordings using the Opti Drive Control utility. According to the results, the quality of the BD recordings was adequate as long as the recording speed remained at 6x or below. We do have some questions regarding the quality of the BD-R recordings at 12x, all the the BD-R DL we used as well as for the 8cm BD-RE discs.

We also expect from LiteOn to add support for the LTH BD-R discs with a firmware upgrade. The drive refused to burn the Verbatim BD-R LTH discs certified for 2x and 6x. On the other hand, an already recorded BD-R LTH disc was fully readable.

To sum up, the LiteOn iHBS112 could be a great tool for fast backups of data on Blu-ray discs, as well as for entertainment allowing you to watch your favorite BD movies on your PC or HD screen. It's price is high but not as high as we might expect for a a 12x BD burner. On the other hand, we would like to see a wider compatibility with DVD and Blu-ray disc media as well as a more stable behavior when it comes to BD/DVD disc burning.