DVD Decryption Performance

In archiving the Rush Hour DVD to the hard drive using DVD Decrypter, the Pioneer drive was on average three seconds slower than the Asus. Over 24 minutes it took to complete the test, that's pretty negligible though.

DVD Read Performance

The average copy time is again a few seconds faster using the Asus drive when copying a variety of large and small data files from a DVD disk to the hard drive.

BD Archive Performance

Archiving a Blu-ray test disc to the hard drive we found the Pioneer now came out a fraction faster than the Asus, however, again a second is here nor there in eleven and a half minutes.

Value and Conclusions

As far as performance goes the Asus BC-1205 PT is a little better than the Pioneer overall but notably so it comes to burning DVD discs. The Asus also has a slightly more stylish fascia but at £60 more expensive than the OEM version of the Pioneer, or £47 more than the retail package, it's a large lump to fork out for a flashy look and a bit of time saving in some scenarios. The Pioneer BDC-S02BK does the essentials well enough and in most cases works within an unnoticeable tolerance of the Asus BC-1205 PT.

When it comes to the additional Cyberlink software, while it does provide a genuine variety of burning, playback, video and photo editing features it is as you would expect, it's still rather limited in parts, but for what is effectively £13, we still feel it's a worthy value-add. On the other hand, the PowerDVD 7.3 playback software that includes hardware video acceleration and basic Blu-ray support, but even this is seriously limited to just two channel audio output, so any multi-channel surround has to be software up-mixed using Cyberlink's internal codec.

If you're building a HTPC to take full advantage of High-Definition Blu-ray discs we thoroughly encourage you to do it properly. It's not just about the video, it's about the audio quality too and both need some investment otherwise the experience over DVD will not be worth the effort. In this instance you'll want the OEM drive, then throw the change at something like the Asus Xonar HDAV or the latest AMD HD 4000 series card with UVD which includes a full HD eight channel LPCM pass through.

The Power2Go disc burning software works well and is certainly better than anything bundled with Windows, but since the drive only writes CD and DVD and not BD like any £15 drive out there it's not limited to just a few options like Blu-ray playback. There's a whole host of alternative software but the popular ones like Nero 8 are £50 and Roxio is, uhh... still confusing. Is Power2Go 5.5 DVD burning software and a couple of free discs worth it for £13? Probably, to some - every test we did here used it and it only spat out one of the budget DVD-Rs the first time round.

With this in mind it's worth re-iterating that the Pioneer can't burn Blu-ray media, but the model that can is around twice the price not including the extra cost of BD-R media over DVD-R.

Final Thoughts

Pioneer has made a very solid, very inexpensive product and the brand name should certainly go a long way to assure the quality and investment is something that's worthwhile, if you're getting into HD movies. It does what it says on the tin and for once even the retail package is at least partially compelling if you don't already have some good disc burning software and Blu-ray playback software.

It's still not cheap enough to become an automatic up-sell purchase over a standard SATA DVD-RW drive, however if you are after some Blu in your life, don't pay any more than you have to.

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What do these scores mean?