C'T looks at Pioneer's pre-production BDR-101 Blu-ray burner

Since the Pioneer BDR-101's pickup head only has a single lens, support for CDs is lacking. During tests we were able to burn a recordable BD-R from TDK for the first time. The VD-R disc has a capacity of 22.56 GB, slightly more than a rewritable BD-RE with only 22.23 GB. The remaining space is used for replacement sectors and defect management on the BD-RE.

In order to write an entire BD-R with 2x (CLV resulting in 9 MB/s), the BDR-101 needed 45:05 minutes. For this Pioneer delivered a test-PC, running a special version of Nero 7.0.5.2. The disc could also be read at 2x without problems. The average access time to a randomly chosen sector was 300 ms.

The drive was also able to write a DVD-R at 8x (ZCLV) in 10:27 minutes. The writing quality on a TDK recordable was goo with a low error rate. Reading a DVD-R the BDR-101 achieved a transfer rate of 8.2 MB/s with an average access time of 272 ms. A DVD-9 was read at 7.5 MB/s and 252 ms.

The drive's DVD error correction was excellent. It was able to read 99.9% of a badly burned test DVD-R and 100% of a badly pressed DVD-ROM ("Horror Disc").

On the back of the enclosure a small cooler blows air to the outside. It is only active if the drive gets too hot though. During tests the BDR-101 stayed surprisingly cool. The temperature on the surface of a freshly written BD-R disc was only at 32 °C (90 F). The noise level was low as well with 2.3 Sone while reading a BD-R and 1.8 Sone while reading a Video-DVD (measured from a 25 cm distance)

Summarizing it can be said that Pioneer did a great job. Technically the BDR-101 is ready for retail already. The drive recognized every disc and did not show any problems - now we only have to hope for an error free AACS implementation. Pioneer's test PC already was equipped with an nVidia graphics card with Geforce 6600GT and HDMI output. But the manufacturer was not able to give an estimated release date for this card.

The requested price for this drive is quite high however. In the USA the BDR-101A (A stands for AACS) the drive is expected to cost $975 - almost twice as much as Samsung's SH-B022. For Europe no price has been set yet. Pioneer is not going to sell the drive as retail, but only with a basic software package for burning data BD and reading BD movies as bulk, starting at the end of March. Software for authoring Blu-Ray movies won't be available before the end of April according to Pioneer.

If the drive will be able to write to dual layer BD recordables with 50 GB is still unclear as these discs are not yet available. But it should be able to read double layer BD-ROM anyway.

Only the second generation of Pioneer's Blu-ray burners is supposed to read and write CDs. The BDR-102 which is already planned for this year will also be able to write Blu-ray recordables with 4x (single and dual layer). DVD-RAM will be written at 5x and DVD recordables at 16x.