For all those who enjoy early information, the first preview of Samsung's SH-B022 Blu-Ray burner for PCs has been published online. The drive writes 25GB of data in less than 45 minutes.

German CT magazine got their hands on a pre-production Samsung Blu-ray Burner for PCs and published a review. The Samsung SH-B022 features a 2x BD Disc writing speed, which means that a 25GB BD disc took 43:40min to burn. According to the publication, the disc was burned using a special version of Nero Burning Rom v7.0.4.

The drive uses a set of two lens in order to read/write Blu-Ray discs and read DVD and CD media. Note that the final version of the drive will also support double layer BD discs with 50GB capacity. What is currently missing in the SH-B022 is the AACS copy protection, which is still not finalized.

The Samsung Blu-ray burner is supposed to sell for around $500 in April. Of course, the release date would be dependant upon the BDA's (Blu-Ray Disc Association) progress, in the conclusion of the "Blu-ray Disc format logo license" and also the finalization of the "copyright protection technology license" for Blu-ray.

Note that the BDA has already completed the specifications for the BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R formats on January 2, 2006. The approved specifications include both single (25GB) and dual (50GB) layer discs.

The completion of the BDA's schedule is also expected to allow software makers to gear-up their BD recording applications to support the creation of a BD-AV disc (BD-ROM), as well as a BD-AV disc.

Once the specifications are completed, in order to use the SH-B022 to playback HD Blu-Ray movies on your PC you need apparently at least a 3Ghz CPU and a 128MB Graphics-Card that supports that support copy protection interfaces HDMI, DVI or HDCP.

More details in this report on Heise (German) .