Blu-ray discs finally went on sale today in the US, a few days ahead of the launch of their players.

Blu-ray has stumbled a bit recently, giving rival the HD-DVD format a chance to take an early lead in terms of product availability. But we’ve been waiting the arrival of both formats to see which rises to the top as they slug it out.

We’ve got a few single layer Blu-ray optical discs in the labs, which we used in our review of Pioneer’s BDR-101A Blu-ray PC drive recently.

As we revealed recently while reporting from Computex in Taiwan, BenQ also plans to bring out two Blu-ray drives in the coming weeks. Its reps contacted us today to arrange a demo of the internal BW1000 and external EW100G drives, so hopefully we’ll get them into our labs for independent tests soon.

Pricing is still high on these products though. Pioneer’s BDR-101A Blu-ray drive costs £555, and at Computex, BenQ told us their PC drives would cost from around $700.

Current Blu-ray discs can store 25GB of data, and cost from about £13, with 50GB double layer discs due soon. Sony has developed a 200GB eight layer disc in its lab, it said, although there has been no indication of when it will be available.