In the age of perpetual licensing, physical media has become more important than ever, serving as a bastion of true ownership amidst a sea of subscription models. While it's relatively easy to play old CDs and DVDs, accessing Blu-Ray is still a bit complicated if you don't have a console. Fortunately, we've found a great deal on an external Blu-Ray player from TROPRO that you can get for just $79.99 on Newegg right now.
For that money, you're getting a sleek aluminum chassis that's compatible with a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac. It uses a USB 3.0 interface with both Type-A and Type-C plus to enable read speeds up to 6X Blu-ray (~27 MB/s), 8X DVD (~11 MB/s), 24X CD (~3.6 MB/s). The maximum write speeds are up to 6X BD-R, 4X BD-RE, 8X DVD±R, 24X CD-R.
The highlight feature here is, of course, the support for 4K 3D Blu-rays that are the highest quality physical media available today. It has industry standard read and write speeds for that, along with solid speeds for both CD and DVD. There's an LED in the front for operation status, next to the eject button that pulls out the disc tray. It supports hot-swapping and has a 2MB cache size as well.
Sixteen years ago, we covered the first 3D Blu-Ray experience that was possible on PC and called it promising. Even though 3D Blu-Rays are still a niche even amongst the home theater crowd, 3D displays are making somewhat of a comeback, so you may never know when you need to dust off that old Avatar disc — this external player will ensure you're ready for that moment.
Companies like Sony offer more premium options in this category but they're not cheap and might not even be available soon due to production woes. LG stopped making Blu-ray players even before that, so third-party, inexpensive options like TROPRO's external 3D Blu-Ray for just $79.99 are a solid alternative. Just make sure to have dedicated software like PowerDVD to properly interface with Blu-ray menus.
If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.
