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.

Company Information

We are sure that most of you know Pioneer already, but if you would like to find out more about Pioneer, you can find out by checking the company information found at: http://www.pioneer.eu/

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.