Addonics Zebra plays HD DVD and Blu-Ray

December 14th, 2007

Addonics Zebra Blu-Ray and HD-DVD external player

Addonics have released their latest addition to the sit on the fence brigade when it comes to HD formats. Their new external player, the Zebra, sports the ability to play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs on your PC, an ideal Christmas present for the undecided! Unfortunately it won’t write to discs of either format but fear not, the usual read/write capabilities for CD and DVD are available with a 16x write speed for DVD-R available.

The unit itself looks pretty sturdy with two models available, ZBH63DES and ZBH63DEU, the latter sporting USB 2.0 connectivity whilst both models can hook up to your PC via eSATA. Here are a few more details for ya

* Max read speeds BD-ROM - 6x (215.79 Mbps), HD DVD-ROM - 3x (109.65 Mbps), DVD-ROM - 16x (22.16 MBps), CD-ROM - 40x
* Writes to DVD-R SL & DL, DVD+R SL & DL, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW
* Plays nicely with Windows 98SE thru to Vista, Linux Kernel 2.6, Solaris 10 upwards and Mac OS X 10.4.x
* Has a fan based cooling system for when you’re overloading it with HD data
* Aluminum body giving a total weight of 3.92 lbs (1.87 kg)
* 258 x 168 x 60 mm

These puppies are already available from Addonics at US$409 and US$429 (for the USB 2.0 option) which seems like a good price for a dual format player. However those of us who would like to write as well as read will have to wait for a suitable player.

Source: Addonics