Pre CES 2007 coverage - Las Vegas (NV) - Lacie will be hitting the Consumer Electronics Show with a bunch of new products. Perhaps most significantly an external Blu-ray writer, Firewire speakers as well as a biometric access hard drive. Get a glimpse of what Lacie will be showing.

There is no question that Blu-ray has not yet lived up to the hype its supporters generated at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show one year ago. We expect the format to come out in force this year once again and try to reinvigorate the enthusiasm for the technology. Lacie is first to announce a new Blu-ray product, which the company claims will be the first external Windows/Mac Blu-ray burner available on a worldwide basis.

Lacie d2 Blu-ray drive

The d2 Blu-ray drive comes with dual USB/Firewire interfaces and supports 25 GB as well as 50 GB BD-Rs/Res and the preceding rewritable DVD and CD formats. There is not much change in terms of pricing from last year, which means that you will pay quite a bit for such devices. Lacie will charge $1150 for this external burner, but at least that will include a 50 GB BD-R disc and Roxio burning software. It is unclear at this time, if the device will include Blu-ray playback software, just in case you have a HD capable graphics system consisting of a HDCP-equipped graphics card and monitor.

Lacie also announced a stylish pair of speakers, which connect to a Firewire port. As of now, we aren't sure what advantage that will bring to users besides occupying a port that isn't too common on the average PC anyway, but we'll find out when we will talk to Lacie representatives at CES. For now, the company promises that the designer speaker set will offer excellent sound fidelity for $80.

Lacie Firewire speakers

The company also announced the d2 Safe Hard Drive, which uses fingerprint recognition to protect data from unauthorized access. Up to ten fingerprints can be recognized by the drive, which sells for $300 in a 500 GB version. The same amount of money will also buy a new 500 GB Backup hard drive ("Quadra") which enables users, much like in similar solution offered for example by Maxtor, to launch back ups by touching a button.

On the higher-end side, Lacie will be displaying network storage solutions with capacities of up to 1 TB for $500 and RAID 5 network storage solutions.