Let's now see how the drive performs with various Blu-ray discs. We remind you that the drive uses the 4x (CAV) speed for reading all the Blu-ray disc formats. For this test, we used many BD-R/RE discs burned at high speeds with the Pioneer BD-R 203 and the Sony BWU-S300 burners.

- BD-ROM SL (25GB, movie)

A typical reading of a BD-ROM SL disc. The iHOS104 drive finished the task in an average speed of 3.01x, a little bit slower than the Pioneer BDC-202 drive, which supports a 5x reading speed with BD discs anyway .

- BD-ROM DL (50GB, movie)

- Blu-ray Disc Movie

In order to perform our BD Movie Playback tests, we used the "Casino Royale" (BD DL ) movie.

The drive's minimum system requirements for BD playback are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or higher
• Memory: 512 MB RAM or higher
• OS: Windows 2000 SP4 / XP / Vista/Win7

However, the recommended specifications for BD Playback and Authoring are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium D 3.4 or higher
• Memory: 1GB RAM or higher
• OS: Windows XP SP2 / Vista
• GPU: nVidia GeForce 7600GT/ 7800GTX512/ 7900GXS/ 7900GX2/ 7900GTX/ 7950GT/ 7950GX2/ 8400GS/ 8500GT/ 8600GT/ 8600GTS/ 8800GTS/ 8800GTX and ATI X1600/ X1800/ X1900/ HD2400/ HD2600/ HD2900 series or above.
• HDCP capable graphics cards with 256 MB RAM, PCI Express x 16, 1920 x 1200 resolution, 32-bit color.
• HDCP capable monitor / TV for HD digital output.

Our testing system consisted of the following:

• Intel Core2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
• 2046MB RAM (Samsung DDR3)
• Windows XP Professional SP3
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS with 256 MB RAM
• a typical non-HDCP monitor, using a resolution of 1600x1200 at 85 Hz
• an LG L246WH-BN 24" Full-HD LCD monitor, HDCP ready 1920x1200@60Hz.

First, we connected our non-HDCP monitor with a typical analog (VGA) connector.

Then we connected the an LG L246WH-BN 24" Full-HD LCD monitor, which was HDCP ready and offers a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60Hz.

The application we used to watch the movies was Cyberlink Power DVD v8.

Here are some photos of the monitor during playback:

In this frame PowerDVD shows us info about the movie and the video/audio bitrate for a specific scene. This varied from approximately 10Mbps to 45Mbps, depending on the complexity of each scene of the movie.

Playback was flawless with the CPU utilization to hardly reach the 25%, for the specific PC configuration. Forward/reverse operations were resumed without any problems throughout the complete movie.

- BD-R SL (25GB, data)

Here we test the reading capabilities of the LiteOn iHOS104 BD-ROM drive with various BD-R discs.

The drive quit reading and gave a read error right after the 1Gb mark. The specific disc BD-R Sl disc was certified for 6x burning and was actually burned at 8x using the Pioneer BDR-203 drive.

Some minor problems here with the reading of the Verbatim LTH BD-R disc. Although reading was resumed after each drop at the speed, these speed fluctuations could make your movie freeze during a possible playback of a video. In addition, they unveil possible problematic sections of the stored data that the drive cannot easily deal with them and could make the disc unreadable in the future.

BD-R SL (7.5GB, data)

Summary

The drive easily read the majority of the BD-ROM and BD-R discs of this test. Some problems might be identified with the Verbatim LTH BD-R as well as the recently introduced TDK and Verbatim BD-R SL discs certified for 6x burning. Playback of a Blu-ray disc movie was great and the drive was responsive to any navigation and FF/RW test we did while playing the movie.