Pioneer USA is promising a Q1 2006 launch for its first PC Blu-ray Disc writer, the BDR-101A, though without giving a firm date or announcing any price.
Key features include the ability to burn to conventional DVD blanks (+/- write-once and rewritable) as well as their Blu-ray equivalents BD-R (write-once) and BD-RE (rewritable).
Significantly, the half-height ATAPI unit is also said to be able to read BD-ROM discs of the sort that will carry commercial movies in High-Def format, as well as read current DVD Video discs.
What Pioneer has not yet done, though, is give a specific date for the launch or comment on how problems with the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) digital rights management system are affecting the product's arrival.
Panasonic, another maker of Blu-ray Disc hardware, is reckoned to have delayed the planned January launch of its own ATAPI Blu-ray drive because of issues with AACS and the same reason lies behind Toshiba's delayed launch of rival HD DVD hardware.
As with HD DVD, Blu-ray Disc uses blue lasers working with shorter wavelengths than the red lasers in today's DVD hardware. This increases the amount of data that can be crammed onto a 12cm disc - currently restricted to under 4.7GB on single-layer discs and under 8.55GB on dual-layer. Pioneer says that the BDR-101A allows up to 25GB of information to be stored on a single-layer Blu-ray Disc - and that, clearly, is very attractive for backup and archiving jobs.
To cover those bases, Pioneer's burner will come with a data-recording program to transfer files to Blu-ray Discs. However, we suspect that many users would prefer to stick with their existing DVD-authoring suites. Fortunately, most of the big-name creators of such suites (including Cyberlink, Nero, Roxio and Sonic) have already updated their latest offerings to include support for Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD and any laggards are likely to do so in the very near future.
The BDR-101A's claimed write speeds are 2x for BD-R/RE; 8x for DVD-R/+R; and 4x for DVD-RW/+RW (4X).
Blu-ray Disc's 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps (Megabits per second) - see the Blu-ray FAQ. That equates to 4.5MegaByte/sec and is more than three times faster than conventional DVD's 1x speed of 11.08Mbps (1.32MegaByte/sec).
It's actually worth quoting Section 1.7 of the FAQ here:
How fast can
you read/write data on a Blu-ray disc?
According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc.
The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware.
If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.
According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc.
The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware.
If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.
So, a 2x write-speed for BD-R/RE theoretically means a nominal data rate of 72Mbps or 9MegaByte/sec. Even so, that would appear to be slower than the rate for the BDR-101A's 8x speed with conventional write-once media - 8x 11.08Mbps = 88.64Mbps (or 11.08MegaByte/sec).
However, since 8x conventional media isn't written to at the highest speed throughout the enitre burn process and it's not clear whether the same is true for a 2x Blu-ray burn, we'd suggest no one makes any major assumptions about relative burn speeds until after there's been some thorough independent reviews of Blu-ray burners.
What is clear, though, is that faster-burning Blu-ray DVD hardware (and discs) would be welcome - and, according to the FAQ, do seem likely to follow, hopefully soon after the initial round of launches - to ensure that burning of high-capacity Blu-ray Discs is carried out more speedily than at 2x and, thus, isn't too much of a chore.
Check out Pioneer's release about the BDR-101A and let us have your thoughts in the HEXUS.community.
