Pioneer released its first Blu-Ray recorder/reader for PCs and Macs some time ago. I didn’t want to be the first to write about this new technology, because Blu-Ray discs were very hard to come by and even today, it’s hard to find the more or less costly media that is required to use the Blu-Ray writer for what it is meant to do. Pioneer managed to send me a test unit a couple of weeks ago, complete with a TDK recordable and rewritable disc. I also received such media from my favourite brand, Verbatim. Roxio’s Blu-Ray system plug-in for Mac OS X (comes with Toast 8) was installed, and I was all set to go.

At first, I installed the Blu-Ray drive into my old LaCie DVD-burner d2 enclosure. That was stupid, as the Pioneer BDR-101 got the hiccups from sitting inside that enclosure (or rather, the enclosure’s firmware got the hiccup from having the Blu-Ray inside). The result was two coasters --a little bit expensive given that Blu-Ray discs are not to be found in abundance.

So, the next thing I did was I built the Pioneer BDR-101 into my Power Mac G5’s optical drive bay. That worked fine, and I started testing it with the TDK and Verbatim media that I received after my two coasters. I made sure the discs would fill up to the maximum allowed by Toast and the burner. Although Blu-Ray single-layer discs theoretically can hold as much as 25GB of data, Toast allowed me to fill them with around 22GB maximum.

500 MB/minute Burning Speed

I used the Pioneer at its full burning speed of 2x. Now, 2x may seem like slow but you must remember that the speed is not just a matter of rotation speed but also of density. Blu-Ray discs are pretty high in density, so 2x is not as slow as you might think. In fact, burning 22GB to these discs --to all of them, regardless of whether they were recordable or rewritable-- took no longer than 42 minutes. That’s a throughput of roughly 500 MB per minute. And that equals recording a DVD at approximately 8x speed. I expected no differences between the two brands, and I was right: the Verbatim and TDK discs performed exactly the same.

The Pioneer did what I expected of it: it performed flawlessly and above all: fairly silently. The noise we’ve grown accustomed to when we’re burning DVDs at 16x or even 18x speed was lacking with my Blu-Ray test recorder. It made some noise, but much less than a high-speed DVD-writer. 

Some reviewers will tell you the Pioneer BDR-101 should really have CD-writing capabilities. You won’t hear that from me. Of course I too want to have it all inside one burner. But if you think about it, the inclusion of CD-writing must be much harder in a Blu-Ray writer than in a DVD-burner. The latter works with a laser of the type that’s also used for CD burning. Blu-Ray’s laser technology is different; its laser is much more powerful, and so the ability to burn CDs as well as Blu-Ray discs would entail building a second mechanism inside the device, adding even more to the cost.

I also think all of this is just testing the waters. Pioneer’s BDR-101 and successors will probably evolve in much the same way as DVD-writers evolved. They will become really useful when applications like DVD Studio Pro can make use of it. We will then be able to burn HD movies ourselves, complete with complex menu structures and extras on our DVDs without running out of space.

That is not the case right now. The new Final Cut Studio that is soon to be released by Apple does have support for Blu-Ray. It’s Compressor 2 that will deliver that support, not DVD Studio Pro by itself. In fact, without the Roxio system extension, the Pioneer BDR-101 Blu-Ray burner wouldn’t even be recognised by Mac OS X. The Pioneer BDR-101 can be had for about 900 Euros.