Pioneer has announced a new Blu-ray burner, the BDR-S08J which should become available in Japan, next month. The drive is based on the Pioneer BDR-208M recorder and it is capable of writing to BD-R discs at 15x while dual layer Blu-ray discs are written at a maximum of 14x. It connects to your computer using the SATA-3 interface and has 4 MB cache.
The drive is compatible with Sony's Nasne NAS which will allow Japanese users to burn digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasts to BD and BDXL discs. It also features Pioneer's PureRead3+ technology which should help in improved playback of audio discs that are scratched and it also has a quiet mode for playback of video and audio. Pioneer reports that the burner is able to show the type and condition of the disk that is loaded and the internal temperature of the drive.
The bundled software will be Digion's DiXiM BD burner, and a range of Cyberlink products, including PowerDVD and PowerProducer. The drive and the bundled software is compatible with Windows 8 and comes with a region code protection. It should cost 23,000 YEN (about $290) and it's unknown of this model will become world-wide available.
