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There's still no sign of who's going to come out top in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray battle, but we're now finally starting to see products arrive on the shelves (both in the PC and home-entertainment arenas).
Whether the result is co-existence or one format dying a quick death remains to be seen.
The BDR-101A is Pioneer's first Blu-ray drive and retails for around £555-£580 online. Pioneer has decided against selling it directly, and is using resellers to distribute it instead.
Of course, a Blu-ray drive is no good to you without Blu-ray media. A 25GB single-layer BR-R (a write-once disc) will set you back around £13, while a BD-RE (a re-writable disc) is roughly £3 extra.
We hooked the BDR-101A up to our test PC and didn't experience any problems during the installation. A copy of Roxio Digitalmedia LE 7 is included and Pioneer tells us it expects most resellers to be supplying this software as standard with the drive.
A total of 22GB of data was written to a BD-R disc in just under 45 minutes. At present, you can only pick up 2x Blu-ray media, although we expect this to change fairly soon.
We're also looking forward to multi-layer Blu-ray media – something Blu-ray and its supporters have been boasting about since day one.
There's talk of eight-layer media eventually becoming available, which will store a staggering 200GB of data on a single disc.
It's good to finally get hold of a Blu-ray writer and we're impressed with the performance, but we find it unlikely many home users will want to splash out on it at present.
Not only is it extremely expensive, but it has no CD support (reading or writing) and if Blu-ray loses out to HD-DVD, you might end up with nothing more than a soulmate for your Betamax video recorder in the loft.
All Optical Drives (CD/DVD Drive)
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