Review: Pioneer Drive Marks Dawn Of Blu-ray DVD Burning

There's been a lot of buzz about the Blu-ray high-definition DVD format--especially its "war" vs. competing standard HD DVD--yet only a trickle of play-only products.

That stands to change, however, with Pioneer Electronics' rollout of the first Blu-ray burner.

The Pioneer BDR-101A DVD drive for PCs is currently the only Blu-ray recorder available. Nevertheless, after trying out a sample product, the CRN Test Center highly recommends the drive to anyone who wants to do Blu-ray DVD authoring on a PC.

Blu-ray DVDs offer substantially more storage capacity--25 Gbytes per layer--than standard DVDs, which hold up to 4.7 Gbytes per layer. Demand for Blu-ray is huge because standard DVDs, with a maximum horizontal resolution of 480 lines, aren't compatible with high-definition video and its 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, which Blu-ray--developed by Sony--was designed to support from the get-go.

Blu-ray disc formats include BD for prerecorded movies, BD-R recordable and BD-RE rewritable. Single- and double-layer Blu-ray discs are available.

With a price of $995, the Pioneer BDR-101A is aimed more at professional users than consumers. The internal 5.25-inch drive interfaces as an ATAPI device and can be installed vertically or horizontally in a PC. It comes bundled with TDK blank DVD media and Sonic Solutions' Roxio DigitalMedia V7 software, which supports BD-R and BD-RE discs.

The BDR-101A can read BD-ROM discs at 2x speed and can read and write single-layer BD-R and BD-RE discs at 2x. The drive also can read standard DVD media at speeds between 6x and 8x, as well as write most DVD recordable formats at speeds of 2x to 8x. It's compatible with dual- and double-layer DVD formats, too.

Unfortunately the BDR-101A isn't compatible with double-layer Blu-ray discs, and it doesn't support CDs, which it really should. The ideal video production system, therefore, should include one Blu-ray drive along with an inexpensive DVD recorder. That will provide compatibility with all types of optical discs, and data can be copied directly from CDs and DVDs to Blu-ray discs.

Note that data on a Blu-ray disc is packed more tightly than on a DVD disc, and the BDR-101A's Blu-ray speed rating of 2x has nothing to do with its standard DVD speed rating of 2x to 8x. Standard DVD drives run at a 1x speed of 10.8 Mbps, or 1.35 MBps. But Blu-ray drives run at a 1x speed of 36 Mbps, or 4.5 MBps. So the 2x BDR-101A has a data transfer rate of 72 Mbps, or 9 MBps.