Positive:

• Excellent and fast Blu-ray burning performance at 8x max.
• Excellent and fast Blu-ray reading performance at 8x max.
• Very good DVD burning performance.
• Excellent DVD±R DL writing performance for a Blu-ray burner.
• Excellent/very good DVD±R writing quality.
• Excellent/very good CD-R/RW writing quality.
• Supports DVD-RAM read and write at 5x.
• Supports BitSetting (BookType DVD-ROM) on DVD+R DL.
• Very good DVD-Video ripping performance.
• Excellent build quality.
• Good software package.
• Near silent operation when playing back BD and DVD movies.

Negative:

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

Conclusion:

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

The main positive points:

The Pioneer BDR-203BK performed extremely well in our tests. BD-R writing performance was excellent and the fastest Blu-ray drive we have yet tested. BD-RE writing performance was also very good. Reading performance with BD media was also very strong, offering the fastest reading speeds and performance currently available.

The Pioneer BDR-203BK 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 good with our tested media and bitsetting was also supported on DVD+R DL media with BookType set to DVD-ROM. DVD±R DL writing performance was also excellent, considering the Pioneer BDR-203BK is a Blu-ray burner.

The CyberLink BD Solution software bundle should provide a good starting point for owners of the Pioneer BDR-203BK for playing and creating BD content. Blu-ray movie playback via PowerDVD using an HDCP compliant screen was excellent.

The Pioneer BDR-203BK’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.

DVD-Video ripping performance was also of a very high standard, in fact it beat quite a few of the dedicated DVD burners in our tests.

The main negative points:

There are not many negative things to say about the Pioneer BDR-203BK. Our only real gripe is CD performance. The drive is slow in both reading and writing to CD recordable media. But we would like to add that the Pioneer BDR-203BK is primarily a Blu-ray burner.

Writing quality on our tested DVD-RW media was not of a high standard, and we hope this can be improved with a future firmware update.

To sum up, this is what we would say:

“The Pioneer BDR-203BK is a very strong performer, and has very few weak points. It’s another very good drive from Pioneer”.

You may comment on this review below or in this forum thread.

The performance and usability of the Pioneer BDR-203BK Blu-ray drive was so good, that we decided to award the drive our CD Freaks “Editor’s choice” award.

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