Pioneer - BDC-S02BK review
Blu-Ray DVD combo drive
Review date: 25 October, 2007. Review by: Simon Williams
One of the things holding back the wholesale adoption of the Blu-Ray disc format is the high price of the drives to read and write the discs. Rumour has it the price has been kept high by Sony taking most available units to put in PlayStation 3 consoles. That demand should be easing off now and Pioneer has just launched the BDC-S02BK, as another way of cutting the Blu-Ray cost.
The company refers to the drive as a combo drive, but not because it will read Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, though the publicity bandies around the term ‘HD' media, which is confusing. Instead, it's a combo drive in the sense of old DVD/CD-RW combos. On this drive you can read and write DVD±RW and DVD±R - and CDs if you want - but also play back Blu-Ray movies. You can't write to Blu-Ray discs, but then you're not paying Blu-Ray writer prices.
This is a SATA drive, so you'll need a SATA controller, either on the mainboard of your PC or on a PCI card, to run it. It's easy enough to connect up and should be recognised automatically by both Windows Vista and XP.
The BDC-S02BK comes with a copy of CyberLink BD Solution, a suite of utilities covering Blu-Ray, DVD and CD playback, DVD rewriting and recording and anything you might want to do with a CD. It's a useful collection of software and supports the drive to its maximum specs. These include 12x DVD±R, 4x DVD±R Dual Layer and 6x DVD±RW.
When we ran our own tests, though (see the tables below), these speeds didn't hold up. Our sample 1GB file took substantially longer to write to a single-layer DVD-R disc than to a DVD+R DL disc and DVD+RW was, overall, quicker than either. These tests used brand new Verbatim media, supplied by Pioneer and certified at 8x DVD+R DL, 16x DVD-R and 8x DVD+RW.
Compared with Pioneer's BDR-101A, reviewed a year ago, this drive is faster on reading and writing DVD+RW discs and on a par with DVD±R. Since it's also around a third of the price of the older drive, it has to be an improvement.
Blu-Ray support is all you need to play back Blu-Ray HD movies, though you will need a PC fast enough to handle the data stream and a suitable HDCP link to your monitor to satisfy the digital rights management. Neither of these requirements is anything to do with the drive, of course.
Verdict
This is a good combo drive for anybody whose interest in Blu-Ray extends no further than HD movie playback. If you need to be able to write Blu-Ray discs, you're still going to have to pay quite a bit more than the BDC-S02BK's asking price. The drive's DVD writing and recording performance is fair, though not as quick as the numbers on the box would have you believe.
Company: Pioneer
Contact: 0870 600 1539
