LG Electronics has cut the retail price of its GBW-H10N Blu-ray Disc Super Multi DVD writer by 33% to US$605 for the Taiwan Market, according to this DigiTimes report.  This drive currently features the quickest Blu-ray writing speed of 4x for single layer BD-R media.  This price production is LG’s aim to clear out its inventory of the drives and increase its market share in preparation for new Blu-ray disc writers hitting the market during the first half of this year.

So far, none of the other Blu-ray writer manufacturers have announced any price cuts yet for their Blu-ray drives.  When it comes to 18x DVD writers, OEM quotations have fallen to around US$25 as a result of strong competition.   

It is nice to finally see a significant cut in Blu-ray writer pricing, especially for this 4x drive, as hopefully this will start competition with the other manufacturers to push their prices down also.  However, the pricing has a long way to come down yet before they become affordable to most consumers and the media is still far more expensive per gigabyte than double layer recordable DVDs.  At present, they would make a good alternative to DAT drives and entry level DLT drives for servers, especially when it comes to recovering files.