Back in the day, when plain ole CD burners first hit the market.…remember that? They were expensive. I absolutely had to have one. I went online and found a mitsumi CD burner for $299, and that was the cheap one. Ahh fond memories of spending 30 minutes to burn an audio CD at 1x speed. That drive lasted me a long time too.

When DVD players first hit the market, they were also expensive. Again I had to have one, so I took the froogle way out. I bought a Creative DVD drive for my PC and used my TNT2 video card to send the image to my television. Spent $199 on that bad boy. Its still in my closet. Both of those drives I bought at those high prices to only see the price drop and drop and drop. Now you can get either one of those drives for less than 30 bucks if you look around.

After those purchases I told myself that I will never try to be first to market with any other optical drive that comes about, I waited till DVD burners came down to about $75 bucks before I bought one. Then this morning, while Im getting ready or work, I run across this bit of news over at Engadget, and my first thought was…."Im getting it"

This news is of LG’s 2nd generation multi format optical drives. The Bluray - HDDVD wars has been going on for over a year now and frankly, Ive given up waiting on a winner, I plan to get both (already have a HDDVD player). But these new PC Optical drives from LG looks to be just what I want in my PC. Both the drives I’m talking about reads HDDVD and BluRay. But theres a bit of a difference between the two, let me break it down for you.

The GGC-H20LI is the cheaper of the 2, costing $400 bucks. It reads HDDVD, Bluray, DVD, and CDs. It burns DVD (both formats), Lightscribe and CDs.

The GGW-H20LI will cost you $500 bucks, reads and writes all the formats the other one reads and writes, but it also burns BD-R/RE at 6x dual layer (BluRay blank media).

LG Multi-Format BluRay HD-DVD drives

So as you can see, right now, this is a dream come true for people that want the ultimate reading and writing optical drive. The only thing is, if you go out and spend $500 bucks on this drive, LG will probably release the 3rd generation of these players that will write to both Bluray and HDDVD media. (read more about it over at Engadget)