Positive:

• Can write BD-R/RE at 4x/2x
• Can read BD-ROM/BD-R/RE at 5x reading speed
• Supports DVD-RAM read and write at 5x
• Excellent/very good CD-R/RW writing quality.
• Excellent/very good DVD±R/RW writing quality.
• Excellent DVD-R DL writing quality.
• Supports BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) on DVD+R DL.
• Excellent build quality.
• Good software package.
• Near silent operation when playing back BD and DVD movies.

Negative:

• Doesn’t support BitSetting for DVD+R/RW
• DVD+RW writing quality on our tested media could be improved.
• Single coloured LED for read/write.
• Slow reading and writing of CD-R/DVD media by today’s standards.

Conclusion:

Let us summarize the most important positive and negative points below:

The main positive points:

The Pioneer BDR-202 performed extremely well in our tests. BD-R writing performance was excellent and BD-RE writing performance was also very good. Reading performance with BD media was also very strong, offering the fastest reading speeds currently available. We would also like to note that BDR-202 can read BD-ROM (BD9) at 8x reading speed, we however were not able to find this media type to run a test.

The Pioneer BDR-202 was able to burn all our tested CD-R/RW media with excellent/very good quality.

DVD±R/RW writing quality was also of a very high standard and on most media very good/excellent.

DVD-R DL writing quality was excellent with our tested media and BitSetting was also supported on DVD+R DL media with BookType set to DVD-ROM.

The inclusion of DVD-RAM read and write is also very useful and adds to the drive’s appeal.

The CyberLink BD Solution software bundle should provide a good starting point for owners of the Pioneer BDR-202 for playing and creating BD content. Blu-ray movie playback via PowerDVD using an HDCP compliant screen was excellent.

The Pioneer BDR-202’s build quality is also excellent. The drive has a solid feel and is fairly heavy. The eject tray has a nice firm feel to it. The drive is also quiet and almost completely silent when playing back Blu-ray or DVD movies.

The main negative points:

There are not many negative things to say about the Pioneer BDR-202. Our only real gripe is CD/DVD performance. The drive is slow in both reading and writing to CD and DVD recordable media. But we would like to add, no slower and indeed a lot faster than many other BD drives in this department. We would also have liked the drive to have been able to write to BD-R/RE double layer.

We would also like to see different coloured LED’s being used for read/write.

To sum up, this is what we would say:

“The Pioneer BDR-202 is a very strong performing Blu-ray drive and does exactly what Pioneer claims it can do. Another excellent effort from Pioneer”.

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