Let's now see how the drive performs with various Blu-ray discs. We remind you that the drive uses the 8x (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 Samsung SH-B083Ldrive finished the task in an average speed of 5.99X.

- BD-ROM DL (50GB, movie)

The supported 4X CAV reading with BD-ROM DL media was confirmed.

- Blu-ray Disc Movie

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

The recommended specifications for BD Playback and Authoring are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz or higher
• Memory: 1GB RAM or higher
• OS: Windows XP SP2 / Vista/7
• GPU: nVidia GeForce 8000, 9000 series, ATI Radeon 2000, 3000 series or above (for hardware decoding)
• 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.

Cyberlink's BD advisor utility is bundled with the drive, offering you a basic testing of your PC and returns information on whether it is ready to play Blu-ray disc content. The utility will look at your CPU, graphics card (for hardware acceleration), system memory, operating system, graphics card driver, installed software player as well as your card's video connection type (analog, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort etc). In addition, it will notify you whether your system supports Blu-ray's Bonus View, BD Live, hardware dual-video decoding for H.264/ MPEG-2/VC-1 as well as your network connection. Suggestions as to how to upgrade your system if needed are also provided.

Once you are qualified for BD play back, you are ready to start Cyberlink's Power DVD v8 software to watch your BD movie:

The appropriate region code should be set before starting playback of a BD movie:

Cyberlink's PowerDVD v8 is also supporting the 'TrueTheater; video enhancing technology. The software allows you to watch standard-definition content in high-definition quality, enhance image details, naturalize colors and automatically adjust chroma and luminance using the 'TruTheater Lighting' slider, enable smoother video playback with frame-rate up-conversion technology (TrueTheater Motion) and also select among three different effects for your display:

Notice that you cannot enjoy nVidia's PureVideo hardware acceleration (if your Nvidia card supports it) and the TruTheater effects at the same time.

Let's move on with the BD movie play back:

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 Samsung SH-B083L drive with various BD-R discs.

BD-R SL (7.5GB, data)

Summary

The drive easily read all the BD-ROM and BD-R discs of this test. No problems were identified even with BD-Rs burned at 6x and 8x or with the Verbatim LTH BD-R discs. 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.