Positive:

• Excellent/very good CD-R/RW writing quality.
• Excellent/very good DVD±R/RW writing quality and performance.
• Excellent/very good DVD±R writing quality.
• Can burn selected DVD±R media faster than its rated speed.
• Good reading performance and reliability.
• Reads pressed DVD Video SL/DL and recordable media at 16x/12x.
• DVD-RAM read and write at 12x
• Supports automatic BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) on DVD+DL.
• No CSS riplock.
• Can overburn CD-R media.
• Can read and write mini DVD media.

Negative:

• No BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) for DVD+R/RW media.
• Slow Audio CD ripping speeds
• Does not support Disc Quality Scanning

Conclusion:

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

The main positive points:

The Pioneer DVR-215BK is a fast drive as far as writing DVD±R media is concerned, recording some of the fastest times on DVD±R discs burned in our reviews.

The Pioneer DVR-215BK wrote our tested DVD±R/RW/DL media with excellent/very good, upholding Pioneer’s tradition in this field.

The Pioneer DVR-215BK was able to burn all our tested CD-R media with excellent/very good quality.

The Pioneer DVR-215BK was also able to burn selected DVD±R/DL media at faster than its rated speed and writing quality was very good indeed.

The Pioneer DVR-215BK is a reasonably well built drive. Noise levels, even at 20x are not intrusive.

The main negative points:

There are not that many negative things to say about the Pioneer DVR-215BK.

DVD+R/RW BitSetting would be nice and would enhance compatibility with some older standalone DVD players.

We would also like to see support for 48x writing speeds on CD-R media.

Audio CD ripping speeds were very slow compared to other drives.

To sum up, this is what we would say:

“The Pioneer DVR-215BK is fast when writing DVD±R/DL media and writing quality across all media groups is generally very good to excellent. It’s another very good drive from Pioneer”

We were very impressed by the Pioneer DVR-215BK writing quality and performance. We decided to award the drive our “CD Freaks Safe Buy Award”.

We found the best price available in the UK at the time of writing the review, to be at SVP UK. £18.88 Inc VAT.

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