There are three main reasons for buying a Blu-ray rewriter: to play Blu-ray movies, to record your own HD videos and to archive substantial amounts of data. Pioneer's BDR-203BK is designed to do all three and to do them faster than previously. The drive is rated at 8x Blu-ray, which is the speed level of all the latest generation of drives.

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You wouldn't know this from the outside, though, as the Pioneer drive looks much like any other Blu-ray, DVD or CD device. With the usual arrangement of tray, data light and eject button, the Blu-ray logo on the front is all that gives the game away. The SATA data and power sockets at the back are another telltale, though, and you'll need a spare channel to connect the drive into.

Pioneer is bundling Cyberlink's Blu-ray Disc Suite 6 with the drive and this suite covers use of the drive for movie playback as well as archival, and can even handle basic edits of HD video. The software is easy to install, though it did require a 95MB update and even then PowerDVD had problems playing our test movie. This was a pre-release copy of the software.