Pioneer BDC-202 is an interesting combo drive that brings you the features of a Blu-ray BD-ROM drive and a DVD recorder. As such it is an interesting choice for any home computer, but especially for HTPCs due to the Blu-ray playback features. We have just started testing the drive, and as usual our primary interest is on the DVD recording quality. The drive uses a “three-way compatible” optical pickup unit, which means that a single optical unit is handling all the disc formats. As such the recording speed is a bit slower than the fastest DVD recorders on the market, but the 12x speed should be quite sufficient for everyone unless you are planning on using the drive for DVD-R mass production. We have just started testing the drive and so we decided to publish the first results right away, even thought the testing work is far from completed, since this is a drive that has a lot of consumer interest currently.

Our first experiences with the combo drive as a DVD recorder have been surprisingly good. I say surprisingly as we kinda expected the DVD recording to be a secondary feature for this drive, but apparently it has done a damn good job so far. As mentioned earlier, the recording speed is limited to 12x using the Z-CLV method (Zone Constant Linear Velocity). So far we have thrown half a dozen types of DVD recordable media in to this drive, and so far it has done a great job. In every case the quality has been comparable to Pioneer’s recent DVD recorder models (DVR-215, DVR-115) and in some cases the BDC-202 has produced extremely good reference quality results.

We will be burning more discs in the days to come, and we will also come back to this great drive with a proper review. Meanwhile you can track our progress by looking at our Nero Disc Speed (previously known as Nero CD-DVD Speed) quality scan results at the MediaBase: CLICK HERE

We are also more than interested in hearing if you already have some experiences with this drive. Use the comment feature below to share your thoughts about it.