Pioneer Electronics' BDR-101A is the first PC burner, targeting the professional market, that records to a Blu-ray disk, packing almost 25 GB on only one write-once disc, informs PC World.

The drive has an 8MB buffer for BD writing and a 2MB buffer for DVD writing, it comes with Sonic's DigitalMedia SE software for disc copying and data writes, and has a single-lens optical pickup with two lasers: a blue laser capable of reading and writing to Blu-ray Disc (BD) and a red laser for reading and writing to DVDs. BDR-101A is also capable of playing Blu-ray Disc movies that will be hopefully launched soon on the market.

The supported formats for the BDR-101A are single-layer 25GB BD-R, the write-once version of Blu-ray Disc, and 25GB BD-RE, BD's rewritable media. Pioneer’s drive is rated to read BD-R, BD-RE, and BD-ROM at a speed of 2X.

The drive is capable of writing to single-layer DVD #00026#177; R at 8X; to dual-layer DVD-R at 2X, to double-layer DVD+R at 2.4X, and to DVD #00026#177; RW at 4X.

Read speeds are 8X for DVD-ROM and DVD #00026#177; R media, and 6X for DVD #00026#177; R DL and DVD #00026#177; RW media.

On the other hand, Pioneer Electronics' BDR-101A is not able to read or write to CDs, or to write to dual-layer 50GB BD media.

Pioneer Electronics’ BDR-101A is available at a price of $1000.