Best external Blu-ray burner: Top 5

Whether you want to create and play your own HD Blu-Ray movies, or back up personal media such as photographs and documents, an external Blu-ray burner is a great way of fulfilling your needs. In most cases very portable, an external burner can also be put away when you don’t need it, or travel with you if you need to go on the move.

The quality of a burner is generally measured by factors such as how quickly it can record discs, its reliability, and other factors such as how it is powered, its design, weight, and overall portability, plus whether it has any extra features. The best burners often also have Lightscribe, cool laser-etching technology that can be used to create customized labels on specially coated discs.

I hope that you enjoy reading my top 5 list for the best external Blu-ray burner and find it useful.

This model is an excellent slim and portable external Blu-ray burner which is frankly a steal at the price that Amazon are asking for it. It has a USB 2.0 interface and can also charge from the USB, so there is no need for a power adapter. It’s not the fastest external Blu-ray burner on the market, of course, but it does the job and it’s the best Blu-ray burner going in the lowest price range.

The DIGISTOR external Blu-ray burner has its own self-charging battery built-in, ensuring that you get a clean burn (it takes its power via USB, so no power cord required). This Blu-ray burner will work with a PC or a Mac and comes with free media and software for creating and playing Bu-ray discs.

The first thing that strikes you about the Samsung SE-506AB external Blu-ray burner is how sleek and attractive it is. Its lightweight and compact design also make it a very convenient device for busy people who want something that’s easy to carry. This burner will read and write DVD+R discs at a speed of 8x.

The Asus SBW-06C1S-U is an attractive and modern-looking external Blu-ray burner with an ergonomic and space saving design. A detachable stand gives you different options for whether you are using your burner at home or on the move. Magic Cinema Technology is supplied with the burner, as well as disc encryption for password protection.

The LG Super Multi Blue BE12LU30 is the best external Blu-ray burner in my list. As well as having 12x BD-R speeds, its USB connectivity means that you just have to plug it to begin burning up to 50GB of your digital data, such as photos, video, documents, music, onto a dual layer Blu-ray recordable disc. One particularly cool feature of this burner is that it has Lightscribe technology, enabling you to make customized labels that can be laser-etched onto specially coated Lightscribe discs (not supplied). As well as being able to record BD-R discs, the burner is also capable of burning CDs and DVDs.