The BDC-202BK is pretty much up there with the best DVDRW drives, ok it might not burn quite as fast as them in some cases but it has a trump card up its sleeve, it plays Blu Ray disks. The picture quality when playing DVD’s is as good as any other drive you can get and as good as any standalone player I have used. The Blu Ray picture quality is amazing, though I have never seen a Blu Ray film before so it was my first time. I did have to spend a little while getting the software set up but it was more than worth it.

As mentioned the burning capabilities of the BDC-202BK are almost as good as a dedicated DVD burner, it is a little down on the speed of the top models but in reality it only makes a few minutes difference per disk. It did seem to fail to detect the rated speed of the media on one occasion but I guess this could have been an issue with the media or software?? All in all the BDC-202BK is a great drive and for the price of approx £80 it makes it one of, if not the cheapest Blu Ray / DVDRW combi drives on the market.

Pros

• Decent writing speed.
• Reliable writing (no coasters generated whilst testing).
• Excellent DVD playback quality.
• Fantastic Blu Ray picture quality
• Possibly the cheapest drive of its type on the market.

Cons

• Did fail to detect the correct burn speed of one disk whilst testing.
• No Pioneer logo??

Reality Check: If you were looking to go Blu Ray in your media pc then look no further the Pioneer BDC-202BK IS the drive you need, and you won’t need that DVDRW drive so if your media pc only has one optical drive slot you wont be losing out.

Reviewed by Mac

Many thanks to Pioneer for supplying the BDC-202BK for review.