The Optiarc BC-5500A is one of the very few first-ever-released Blu-ray playback capable drives for notebooks. Optiarc has also not left aside CD/DVD and DVD-RAM formats and with the BC-5500A gives laptop users another reason to upgrade. Don't forget that you must have the corresponding processor/graphics card in order to enjoy Blu-ray movies, the drive itself alone won't help.

To summarize the performance, the drive's low writing speed capabilities are not to be left unsaid despite the fact that 5 out of the 16 DVD's tested in our labs, passed the burning quality tests with flying colours. The reading session graphs were all as smooth as silk and the drive also seems to have a very good error correction mechanism which showed up especially on DVD's where there were no inconveniences at all.

We cannot neglect the fact that the drive was incapable of even recognizing any of the several CD-RW media that we tried to test on it, after using it for a while. We cannot easily arise hardware reliability concerns here, so let's wait until we have the chance to test a new drive sample again before drawing conclusions. The drive's support for Blu-ray is definitely its strongest advantage, especially after the successful playback and reading tests with BD-ROM and BD-R, BD-RE media.

Concluding, the Optiarc drive is not even close to a disappointment while it achieved to score pretty highly on most of our tests. Its price is not what someone would call affordable though (US$383.61) and this prevents the BC-5500A drive from having the potential to become a best seller, at least for the mainstream laptop users. Small form factor users may also look with interest BC-5500A. Overall a very good proposal for users who need a high-definition slim-line optical drive.