CD Freaks are proud to present
The Pioneer BDR-202 Blu-ray Burner Mini Review


You can read the review here

Please feel free to comment on the review in this thread.

Price: 750$ and up.
Wow.

£239 here in the UK

£239 = $500. Quite cheap in the UK, here in the US still around $620 and up.

Thanks for the review btw.

€410 in Germany.

Why does Infotool show us write support for BD-R DL and BD-RE DL too???

Most probably a bug in InfoTool. It also reported that the BDC-S02BK which i reviewed last month could write BD-R/RE and of course, that is not possible.

Thank you Dee. It seems CD/DVD performance is just an on going thing until mfgrs get it right. Maybe they just need to release a Blu-ray burner and forget about CD/DVD/DVD-RAM burning for now.

I to Erik Deppe but Info Tool hasn't worked good for me in a couple years.

I have never even seen any DVD-RAM media yet. Nevermind 12X, I have never seen 5X. Why did they even release that format?

DVD-RAM is more popular in Europe and Asia.
It's more reliable than DVD RW. It can be read and written at the same time, allowing things like "time slip" and its faster.

And the recording surface has a sexy pattern.

Thanks Dee!

And about DVD-RAM: I'd love to get 12x here in europe, but the industry has decided to deny such a request.

@Dee-27

Nice Review

But Just A Quick Question.

The Lite-On LH-20A1L FW-BL05 Was Used For Scanning.

Except For 1:
A Lite-On LH-20A1P FW-KL0G Was Used For The Taiyo Yuden DVD+R 16x YUDEN000T03. (Checkout The Date)

Is That The Correct Scan From The Pioneer BDR-202 Blu-ray Burner?

Hi Pulse.
Yes, that was the date i received the drive. It was fitted and tested then removed again as i had other drives to review before i could start on the BDR-202 review. Also the disc was scanned on my scanning drive at that time.

Thanks Dee-27

For The Clarification.

I'll post here instead of on the review -

Why would it be negative to have a slower writing speed on CD-R and DVD+-R/W?

The difference between 52x and 24x CD-R writing is not double. It's more like 52x gets the job done 1 or so minutes faster. Big deal.

Same with 12x DVD writing compared to 20x. You're not saving almost 50% time, you're saving like 2-3 minutes max. Bugger all really. I'm quite impressed with the way this blu ray writer supports so many older media formats to such a good standard.

Read speed can have the same rule applied. It's a Blu Ray WRITER. It does not need to support reading older media formats at lightning speeds.

I think CDFreaks needs to re-think it's negative parts of reviews. Single coloured LED - cmon please, who actually cares about the colour of a LED? There's probably only been a handful of writers out of thousands that have actually had this feature.

"Write quality is poor but hey, I got a multi coloured LED and you don't, eat that!"

Apart from my negative view about your negative points (lol) the writer does look like it gets the job done well. I'll definitely be getting a Pioneer for my first Blu ray writer.

Maybe you haven't noticed but, RW media likes to be written at its rated speed. Slower means poor quality in most cases.

It's a big deal to 95% of readers who read these reviews, 95% don't care about writing quality, they consider a burn successful if it completes. They judge performance on how quickly the disc can be written. That's why we have the conclusion in the first page of reviews. Statistics have shown that most readers never read, or simply don't understand about scanning or writing quality.

CD Freaks do not have to change anything on the whim of a single or handful of users. Our methods and procedures are tried and tested over many years. The same rules apply to all drives tested. And we constantly re-evaluate these methods.

Maybe I haven't noticed because RW media is not used as much as write once is. I thought you just said almost no one looks at write quality. So why did you say slower writing on RW means lower quality? I thought 95% of people did not care about that?

I'm just suggesting some things. I bet most of the forum users would agree with my points. I don't think some of those things are actually negative. The LED thing has to go, it's annoying and who actually cares about it's colour?

I'm pretty sure that more and more people these days will read about the write quality if it's there to read. I never knew anything about writers and when I first came to cdfreaks, I found the write quality parts very interesting and I always read them. I have no idea where you pulled the 95% figure from. Making up % figures is not smart unless you got the facts to back it up.

Why don't you make a poll: See what people here think about those negative points for the pioneer drive? Or should I?

@cd pirate
A site the size of CD Freaks has to have statistics available.

But, please feel free to make a poll.

is there not a bd-r dl (50gb) burner out yet capable of burning bd-r dl media (50gb)?

READ the other reviews!

thanks for the help, much appreciated......

ordered the plextor...........

I have been reading with a lot of intesterest your review of this new Pioneer BDR-202 Blu-ray burner
but I have a special interest in the play-back of burned BD-R’s or BD-RE's.

It is easy to find on the Net playback tests of pressed BD-ROM movies in computer drives such as the present LG burner
but I have not beeen able to find one single reading test of a burned BD-R in a standalone Blu-ray player

I mean especially HD content coming from a HD camcorder and authored and burned according to the blu-ray specs for BD-R’s and BD-RE’s.
Some people believe that these burned BD-R's discs even if they correctly authored and burned
- play in a Sony PS3 console
- but don’t play in the majority od the standalone blu-ray players

I like to know your opinion about the major issue for the BD-R format.
Is this only a question of firmware update for standalone players or has it to dor more deeply with the AACS or other protections ?
I have seen in some places
- that AACS is mandatory in the BDMV format for standalones
- the AACS is not mandatory for ther HD-DVD format

franz99,

AFAIK it has to do with protections we all know.

It is true (at least now) that AACS is mandatory in the BDMV format but that doesn't mean without AACS standalones cannot play it back. I can playback BDMV BD-R/RE without AACS on my PS3 and I know a friend can playback BDMV BD-R/RE on his Samsung standalone blu-ray player.

I think if a player cannot play BDMV, there's something wrong with the disc authoring and/or blu-ray disc structure.

Nevertheless, there are authoring softwares that also support creating AACS Content Protection such as Sonic Scenarist and Roxio DVDit Pro HD.