The Pioneer BDR-202 puts us in a pretty awkward position with its somewhat good-somewhat bad results. There was very good performance in the CD reading and DVD Error correction tests, and average in the CD Error Correction tests.

The real problems occurred in the burnings. The worst thing was the fact that, digital errors occurred on every single scanning test that we performed on media burned with the BDR-202 drive. In most cases, the digital error limits were slightly exceeded, with only 1 or 2 POFs. This doesn't change the fact that digital errors exist though. This of course, might not affect the reading procedure of media burned with the specific drive, but it was a major characteristic and bears mentioning in this conclusion page. Frankly, we expected better performance from a drive that burns DVD recordable media at a maximum speed of 12x.

Writing quality with CD-R media is very good, while the corresponding measurements with CD-RW discs showed that there is room for improvement.

The fact that the BDR-202 drive does burn Blu-Ray media at 4x, is what we'd call an advantage, since it keeps the price down to earth, compared with many other Blu-ray burners. Compatibility with the majority of the available BD-R/RE media is good, and the recorded Blu-ray discs were readable with all the Blu-ray drives we tested. On the other hand, the lack of reading support for BD-R DL media (not BD-ROM) could be considered as a minus.

E-shops price the drive at somewhere around the US$600 mark, which is still pretty high for the average user. It's also a long way from the top of the Blu-ray burning technology tree, which could have made it an attractive buy for the price, but we already knew that. Pioneer's second generation Blu-Ray burner missed out on an overall good rating due to the number of specific issues left open.