Pioneer's second generation BDR-2207 (BDR-207M) BDXL burner is a significant upgrade over the company's first generation BDR-206M BDXL model. The latest drive shares the same CD/DVD/BD features of a 12x BD burner such as the BDR-S06 XLB and moves closer to the consumer market by offering increased burning speeds for high-capacity BDXL media.

One of the greatest features of the new drive is its wide compatibility with BD-R SL/DL discs and the fast that it will burn the discs at speeds higher than their nominal speed. For example, you will see some 4x BD-R SL to be burned at 10X and even 12X. That's very convenient as you may low burning times using more affordable and commonly met at the stores BD media. However, the obvious trade-off is the quality of some of these recordings. Although the read-out of these discs was easy and flawless, the measurements we took with these discs indicated high rates of parity errors on both Long Distance Code ( LDC) and Burst Indication Subcode (BIS). Of course, we cannot be sure of the accuracy of these measurements but they do remain an indication of the quality of a recorded disc.

Sharing some characteristics of the BDR-S06 series, the Pioneer BDR-2323007 is a great CD and DVD burner. The CD and DVD writing quality for both media types was very high, so you can be rest assured that your discs will be accurately burned even at the highest supported speeds of 40x and 16x, respectively. An exception could be the behavior of the drive with some DVD+Rs when the drive decided to burn at 12x instead of the maximum supported 16x, along with DVD+R DL discs, for which we measured high PI8 errors.

Regarding the reading capabilities of the drive, all CD/DVD/CD media reading tests were completed without any read errors. The drive was slow in the DAE test with EAC, as it does not report C2 pointer information and it supports caching. With BD-R SL and BD-RE discs, the drive reaches the maximum 16X reading speed faster than competitive drives and as such, it has an edge over a typical 8X reader. In addition, the drive easily passed our reading tests with defected DVDs but did not score very high at the corresponding test with defected CDs. In this case, PureRead could help you playback your old Audio CDs correctly, as long as they are not severely damaged.

The drive supports triple-layer BD-R (write-once) and BD-RE (rewritable) discs with huge capacities of 100GB, and even 128GB quad-layer BD-R discs. Given the layers involved, the BD XL (recordable) specifications are limiting the burning of these new BDXL discs to 4x speed. In our tests, the BDR-2207 burned more than 95GB of data in 1 hr and 35 minutes at 6x. The TDK BD-R TL disc was fully readable. We did not have the chance to test the drive with a Panasonic BD-RE TL disc, as samples of these discs are very limited.

Speaking of BDXL media, their price remains very high for the end-user and TDK/Imation remains the sole disc maker to produce such discs.

The Pioneer BDR-2207 BDXL burner packs sophisticated optical storage technology and its now available at $100 - half the price of the company's previous generation BDXL burner. Admittedly, BDXL gives the security of a physical disc archive, but the low price of multi-terabyte hard disks or NAS devices are better options in terms of speed, convenience and flexibility. As a result, the BDR-2207 faces an uphill struggle to achieve widespread adoption. On the other hand, professionals who need a reliable optical medium for archiving may find the drive appealing. Enthusiasts who are looking for a niche product will also find the Pioneer drive interesting, especially those who regularly back up huge amounts of data.