LG now has some competition on the market for its Blu-ray drive, the GBW H10N, in the shape of a similar device from Sony.

Sony’s BWU-100A was first announced in March at a trade show in Las Vegas, and is now finally ready to hit the shelves in the UK.

The drive reads and records both single and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE media, and is bundled with CyberLink BD Solution software to make recording to the new disc format easy.

Sony’s drive, with write speeds for Blu-ray at 2x, is twice as slow as LG’s newly announced drive. It, too, is backward compatible with all DVD and CD formats, and reaches speeds of up to 24x CD-R recording.

The drive supports playback of commercial Blu-ray movies as well as home-created content; Sony has promised an upgrade for the bundled software by October that makes it capable to playback copy-protected material.

While LG has promised that its drive will be available for £500, Sony has set its price £649.

In related news, Sony is promising to unveil a standalone Blu-ray recorder by December in Japan.

>> Sony - Official website of Sony