Pioneer launches PC based Blu-ray drive

28 December 2005 10:57 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Pioneer Electronics has announced one of the industry's first Blu-ray computer drives in what is the latest twist in the battle for supremacy over which next generation DVD format wins.

Pioneer is part of the Blu-ray consortium, led by Sony competing against Toshiba's HD DVD technology.

According to Pioneer, the new drive “will be targeted primarily to professional users and serious enthusiasts, generally the first to adopt new technology”.

The company went on to say: “In particular, content creators will depend on Blu-ray Disc writers to test and evaluate high definition consumer Blu-ray Disc titles during the authoring process before replication”.

The drive will come equipped with a data recording application to transfer digital files to Blu-ray Discs.

Pioneer also said that users would be able to use the drive to store high definition data off a television tuner on their PC for later viewing.

The drive also will be able to play consumer Blu-ray Disc movie titles on BD-ROM discs and will play and record standard DVD media.

The half height BDR-101A Blu-ray Disc/DVD writer will read BD-ROM/R/RE, DVD-ROM/DVD-R/DVD-RW and +R/+RW discs. It offers the following write speeds: BD-R/RE (2X), DVD-R/+R (8X), and DVD-RW/+RW (4X).

Full tags

Hardware, DVD, Pioneer