Review: Pioneer BDC-S02 Blu-ray drive

Affordable way to watch Blu-ray

The BDC-S02 is rather confusingly labelled a ‘combo’ drive but only plays Blu-ray discs, not HD-DVDs.

Its big selling point, however, is that it’s half the price of the average Blu-ray drive.

It writes dual-layer DVDs, while a blue laser diode means it can also read Blu-ray discs, although it can’t write to them.

Pioneer tells us read-only blue laser diodes have much higher yields, thus being cheaper to manufacture.

We tested a pre-production BDC-202 OEM drive, which has the exact same spec as the retail BDC-S02, and it played Blu-ray films and wrote to DVDs fine. The BDC-S02 adds burning and playback software, along with a Blu-ray movie.