Pioneer always seem to be there at the leading edge of new burners - we still have a rather well behaved A03 DVD burner here - and it’s no surprise that their Blu Ray burner is now out and ready to buy.
The BDR-101A is a 2 speed Blu-ray recorder for PCs. Don’t be put off by the 2 speed, if you are used to 16x DVD burners and the like. This is first gen Blu Ray, so it will be slower, but 2 x Blu Ray is the same as over 6 x DVD speed. Although Blu Ray is a single or dual layer technology, this burner is single layer only for Blu Ray, supporting: BD-R, BD-RE (single layer). It can also burn to DVD (including dual layer): DVD-R/+R, DVD-RW/+RW, DVD+R/-R DL. Note that there is no CD support at all: read nor write.
With a standard ATA interface, you should be able to plug this burner into pretty much anything.
Roxio Digital Media 7 is provided as the burning software, but there is no Blu Ray movie playback software included, which pints this burner directly at the data archiving side of things.
If you really, like really, need Blu Ray burning now, then you probably already have an order for one of these waiting to be fulfilled. If you don’t really need one yet, then it’s probably best to wait. Over the coming months speeds will increase, prices will drop, media will get cheaper and Blu Ray movie playback will be included.
Extreme Tech have a full set of test results.