Pioneer was kind enough to send us the BDR-203BK Blu-ray writer for review. The drive supports Blu-ray writing and reading, in addition, this drive also supports DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW writing.

It’s always exciting to get hold of a new piece of technology, especially when the leap in technology is so far reaching as Blu-ray offers, with much improved storage capacity, the possibility of being able to watch movies in High Definition, bringing a completely new viewing experience.

In this review we will be testing out the latest Blu-ray burner, the BDR-203BK from Pioneer, one of the world’s most respected electronics manufacturers.

The Pioneer BDR-203BK supports 8x BD-R, 2x BD-RE, 16x DVD±R, 8x/6x DVD+RW/-RW, and 8x DVD+R DL/-R DL writing technology, allowing Blu-ray discs of 50GB and DVD Double/Dual Layer discs of 8.5GB to be written. In addition, the Pioneer BDR-203BK also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at 5x.

Drive Specifications

We found the specifications of the Pioneer BDR-203BK at the Pioneer website

What’s inside the box

Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself and what the drive came shipped with.

Our bulk package contained the Pioneer BDR-203BK drive.

Now let’s take a look at the drive.

The bezel of the Pioneer BDR-203BK is plainly styled. We can also see various logos, an emergency eject hole, single green LED and an eject button.

Drive top

Drive bottom

On the top of the drive we found two labels and we can see the drive was manufactured in Japan during December 2008.

On the rear of the drive we can see from left to right, a factory configuration connector, SATA power and data connectors.

Now let’s head on to the next page were we can take a look at the features of the drive….

Features and writing technology

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14 Comments

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 07 Apr 09 15:41

Price ?.

H3rB3i: Posts: 3942; Posted on: 08 Apr 09 08:56

Here in Europe and according to geizhals.at you can buy that drive starting at € 200,- http://geizhals.at/eu/a407628.html
This message was edited at: 08-04-2009 08:57

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 09 Apr 09 18:58

It\'s under $200 US at a few places. I could not get the BD Solutions to install. Kept telling me that it was for a Pioneer device only. Even though it showed as such in Device Manager.

photonic: Posts: 562; Posted on: 12 Apr 09 12:45

I already own this drive and I am happy with it!

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 14 Apr 09 16:53

Is it the Scandisk feature really useful to test the quality of the burn, or is it used simply because a surface scan (PI&PO, just like you do with dvds) is not possible? Thanks

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 14 May 09 09:07

Please advise what your comp minimum requirements are to run this Blu Ray burner. Many Thanks

Dee: Posts: 11828; Posted on: 16 May 09 15:36

There are no minimum requirements listed for this drive. if you intend to use the drive for watching Blu ray films on the PC, then a fairly powerful CPU and graphics card will be required. CPU Intel E6600 dual core duo of faster would be recommended. Graphics card: ATI 38xx series or faster. nVidia 8500 or faster. To burn BD movies at full speed, a relatively fast HDD will also be required. Any newish SATA drive should be fast enough. USB drives are not fast enough.
This message was edited at: 16-05-2009 15:38

Tommymang: Posts: 8; Posted on: 16 Jun 09 12:41

Have this drive for more than a week now. I am very pleased with it ! (Vista 32bit)

okokbe: Posts: 4; Posted on: 19 Jun 09 14:54

[spam]

rojozia: Posts: 2; Posted on: 12 Apr 10 15:44

I have a question, that I hope you can help me with. I have a Hewlett-Packard Pavillion dv5-1017nr. Will this BDR-203bk burner fit in it? The photos shown in this review make it look like it will only fit in a desktop computer.
Thanks

cvs: Posts: 1241; Posted on: 12 Apr 10 20:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by rojozia

The BDR-20x drives are all desktop drives (5.25" drives), so NO, they won't fit inside a notebook.

Given that there aren't many slim Blu-Ray writers around which one could fit in a laptop in the first place (and even less of them which can reliably burn even on high quality Blu-Ray media), you'll probably be much better off buying either an external Blu-Ray drive or an internal desktop version + a suitable USB/e-SATA enclosure which you can then connect to your laptop via either USB or e-SATA in order to burn Blu-Ray discs.
All in all it will be probably a cheaper and definitely a more reliable and future proof alternative anyway.

Pioneer drives and the latest 10x and 12x LG drives are the only drives worth buying based on their burn performance. Stay away from others (as well as earlier 6x and 8x LG models) which are quite poor.

If you only need a slim Blu-Ray READER for your laptop (instead of a much more expensive Blu-Ray writer), then there's quite a bit of choice available. Stay well away from MatSHITa drives and be aware that firmware support is generally very poor for these drives. I recommend an LG CT10 BD-ROM drive which is pretty much the only drive out there which currently can be easily flashed with different OEM firmware.

rojozia: Posts: 2; Posted on: 12 Apr 10 22:35

CVS - Thx for all the info. I do need a burner, not just a player, for my notebook. So ... since I probably don't have enough computer smarts to piece together a high quality internal drive to an enclosure and make it work, I'm thinking that I'd like to buy a reliable, external burner. The one that appears the best to to me (at least in the 'reasonable affordability' category is, the

LACIE d2 8X BD-R 2X BD-RE 8X

Do you believe this would be a fairly reliable external BD-R burner? Do have any other specific recommendations? I read that the Buffalo external driver isn't that great.

Thank you again for your help

_chef_: Posts: 29531; Posted on: 13 Apr 10 09:32

Slimtype burners are a waste of time and money, kinda all of them.
Half-height drives are reliable.

cvs: Posts: 1241; Posted on: 14 Apr 10 01:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by rojozia

I do not know which 8x drive Lacie is using in their external burner ... might be a Matshita/Panasonic one or an LG one ... in which case you should stay well away.

For their 8x internal drives Buffalo uses both Matshita (Panasonic) drives (models starting with the BR-816 identifier), LG drives (models starting with BR-H816) and Pioneer drives (models starting with BR-PI816).
The problem is that as far as I know they only have 8x external models based on either Matshita (BR-816SU2) or LG (BR-H816SU2, BRHC-6316U2), but not on Pioneer (the BR-PI816SU2 does not exist). Matshita drives are a complete disaster regardless of speed and model, and the 6x or 8x LG drives are quite poor, so you should stay away of both.

If you can find a 10x or 12x external drive, then things are much easier, since the drive inside of those would be either LG or Pioneer and both are very good burners.

The best and probably much cheaper option is to bite the bullet and go for a DIY solution (drive + enclosure). Once you choose the right enclosure (there are several threads around suggesting good ones) it is quite easy to assemble them, so you should really not be put off by the apparent complexity of the task ... you just need to connect the drive using the SATA and power connectors provided in the enclosure, fix the drive in place with a few screws and then mount the enclosure's cover back on ... it is really as simple as that!

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Blu-ray writers & players

Blu-ray has won the war for the new high definition optical format. More frequently manufacturers are presenting laptops and desktops which feature a blu-ray drive. Blu-ray players are only able to read Blu-ray (and CD/DVD) media, whereas Blu-ray writers are able to write Blu-ray, CD and DVD media. At the moment blank Blu-ray drives are still rather expensive though, but Blu-ray offers high storage capacity which makes it an excellent back-up medium.More about this

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