This article is more than 1 year old

Pioneer BDR-203BK

The essential desktop upgrade?

PowerDVD 8, normally a good movie player, required a 95MB ‘patch’ – more like a new version – before being ostensibly ready to go. Even then, once we’d clicked Play to run a Blu-ray movie, the program promptly closed. This was a repeatable problem, even after resetting the test machine with a power down. The copy of the Cyberlink software we used had to be downloaded from the Pioneer site, as the discs weren’t ready when the review drives were sent out, but the DVD bundled in retail boxes may well have this problem sorted.

Pioneer BDR-203BK

PowerDVD failed to make us smile

As it was, though, we couldn’t get PowerDVD 8 to play Blu-ray and had to use WinDVD to check this aspect of the drive’s performance. We had no problems playing a Blu-ray copy of Quantum of Solace with the Corel software – other than the film’s incoherent plot. There were no noticeable screen artefacts and video and audio output was what HD should be.

Despite there being no official 8x Blu-ray media freely available, Pioneer has tested a number of different brands of 4x discs as being ‘overspeed’ capable with the BDR-203BK. In other words, you can write to them at up to 8x. The list includes certain single-layer and dual-layer BD-R discs from CMC, MBI, Panasonic, Philips, Ritek, Sony, TDK and Verbatim.

The TDK 4x discs supplied by Pioneer were all 8x capable. According to ImgBrn, which we used for our tests, over half the disc was, in fact, written at 7.7x or above and the average speed was 6x. We wrote 23GB of data in 14m 18s, which is considerably quicker than from 4x models, though not twice as quick.

Media Burn Test Results

Pioneer BDR-203BK

Read and write times in seconds
Shorter bars are better

The read-back time – not a worry when streaming a video, but relevant if using Blu-ray for archival – was 15m 26s for the same data, so again a noticeable speed improvement over 4x drives.

Next page: Verdict

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like