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

DVD "war" vs. competing standard HD DVD

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. The Test Center tested the BDR-101A in a state-of-the-art PC powered by a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor with 1 Gbyte of Kingston memory installed on an Intel D975XBX motherboard. The computer also contained a 750-Gbyte Seagate Barracuda hard drive.

Test Center engineers first burned 4,502.8 Mbytes (about 4.37 Gbytes, contained in two folders and 107 files) to a DVD-R disc, which the BDR-101A is rated to record on at 8x, or 10.8 MBps. The job started at 4.25x but finished at 8x, taking a total of 10 minutes 36 seconds to complete. The drive, therefore, averaged a DVD-R record speed of 7.08 MBps, which is less than 6x but still fast enough not to cause complaints.

Next, the Test Center burned the same set of files to a BD-RE disc, which the Roxio DigitalMedia software recognized as having a total capacity of 23.1 Gbytes. The drive did the complete burn at 2x and finished in 9 minutes 15 seconds, resulting in an average BD-RE record speed of 8.11 MBps--again, slower than its rating of 9 MBps, but still sufficiently fast.

The BDR-101A records faster on Blu-ray media than on standard DVD media. That's a plus because Blu-ray discs hold at least five times as much data as DVD discs. Still, BD-RE media isn't cheap, costing roughly $20 for a single-layer disc.

For now, Pioneer's BDR-101A drive is the only Blu-ray recorder in town, but the Test Center found it a solid performer. Sony's first Blu-ray recorder, the BWU-100A, is expected to become available soon and will supposedly support dual-layer, 50-Gbyte Blu-ray discs and CDs, and also cost less. Anyone not in an immediate rush to author Blu-ray discs might want to wait and see how the Sony drive performs before purchasing a Blu-ray burner.

Blu-ray's archrival, HD DVD, is currently available in a few play-only units, and no PC recorders are on the market at this time. Blu-ray and HD DVD pre-recorded movies are already for sale, yet the two standards are totally different formats. So video professionals will need both types of drives, as a combo unit is likely years away--that is, if anyone decides to make one.