Asus External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive [Asus SBC-04D1S-U Notebook/Laptop BD Player]

If you’re looking for an external Blu-ray player offering USB connectivity, thus allowing you to hook it up to laptops/notebooks in order to enjoy HD movies, whilst also seeking the ability to read/write DVDs, then the newly announced SBC-04D1S-U Asus External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive may be worth your due consideration.

We say ‘may’ as the Asus External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive may well offer DVD writing capabilities, however, if you’re looking for an external BD writer you’ll need to look elsewhere – as, in terms of Blu-ray optical media, the SBC-04D1S-U is limited to reading only.

That said if you’re looking for a highly portable external BD optical drive to facilitate playing HD movies on your notebook, laptop (or netbook) – assuming that your portable PC doesn’t come with integrated Blu-ray and it’s display is HD capable – then the Asus External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive, with its glossy, black aesthetics (that reminds us of LaCie’s external HDDs) will undoubtedly suffice. Not only that, but the X imprinted on the side of the drive’s case lights up and the drive even comes with a bundled application allowing you to control the brightness of its illumination (which is either the icing on the cake or merely an aesthetic irrelevance – depending on your perspective).

Capable of reading from BD-ROM/R-RE optical media as well as reading and writing to DVDs (max DVD write speed coming in at 8x for both DVD+R and DVD+RW media) and CDs at up to 24x write speeds, the Asus External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive comes with Turbo Engine technology, ensuring that its USB connectivity offers up maximum data transmission rates, disc encryption, HD upscaling capabilities courtesy of TrueTheater High Definition (TTHD) and comes bundled with Cyberlink burning software.

Asus are, unfortunately, yet to announce either unit pricing or any specific availability date of their SBC-04D1S-U External USB Slim BD-Combo Drive but we will, of course, endeavour to offer you a heads up the moment this info is made available to us.