Although the primary reason for buying a Blu-ray recorder is to burn Blu-ray discs and play HD movies, it’s going to take up a drive slot in your PC, so DVD and CD capability are also important on a day-to-day basis. The BDR-203BK is well specified down through the formats, running DVD±R at 16x, DVD+RW at 8x and DVD-RW at 6x. Finally, it’s a 32x CD recorder, too.

Colour conscious: BK on the BDR-203BK simply indicates black fascia

Under test it did pretty well against these specs. 4.5GB of data wrote to a 16x DVD+R in just 345 seconds and only took five more on a DVD-R. The same data was read back in 306 seconds, giving an average write speed of 13MB/s, with 14.7MB/s for reading. DVD+RW, as usual, is slower, with figures of 504s writing and 513s reading, but these times still equate to 8.9MB/s and 8.8MB/s, respectively.

Verdict

This is a true 8x Blu-ray recorder that can speed up video recordings and data archiving alike. As long as you have a Sata line available, it’s an easy internal fit and comes bundled with a strong Blu-ray software suite from Cyberlink - strong, that is, if PowerDVD works for you. ®

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