Buffalo announces world's first 12x Blu-ray burner (and it's USB 3.0, too)

USB 3.0 is just around the corner (kind of), and the first computer hardware manufacturers are getting ready to deliver products supporting the new standard (even though there were some backlashes along the way). Last month, Asus announced the world’s first USB 3.0 + SATA 6.0 PCI-E card. In May, NEC said they’re going to release the first USB 3.0 host controller.

And now Japanese computer hardware company Buffalo has announced [JP] the world’s first 12x Blu-ray burner, which supports USB 3.0 on top of that. The BR-X1216U3 is backward compatible with USB 2.0 but will burn your Blu-rays with “just” 7x speed in that case. You can only use it with a Windows machine (XP/Vista/7).

But actually there are no Blu-ray discs which could be used with a 12x burner and no USB 3.0-equipped computers out there at this point, but Japan is known to be a tad quicker than the rest of the tech world sometimes.

Buffalo says they will roll out the burner at the beginning of next month. Japanese street price: $460. The company hasn’t said anything yet about international sales.