Pioneer Japan recently announced its latest 16x Blu-ray Disc writer, the BDR-212JBK. This new drive offers support for M-DISC media and is capable of 16x BD-R, 14x BD-R DL, 8x BD-R LTH, 2x BD-RE and 2x BD-RE DL writing speeds and a maximum BD-ROM read speed of 12x. The BDR-212JBK also writes to triple-layer (100GB) BD-R media at 8x, quad-layer (128GB) BD-R media at 6x and triple-layer (100GB) BD-RE media at 2x.
What makes the BDR-212JBK truly special is its ability to play back Ultra HD Blu-ray content. When installed in a Windows 10 PC with the included PowerDVD software and an i7 or i5 Kaby Lake processor, users can watch movies at 4K resolutions. The drive also ships with authoring software from CyberLink and is equipped with Pioneer's PureRead 3+ technology, which greatly improves the reading performance of scratched and dirty discs. The BDR-212JBK is expected to hit stores in mid May for about 16,000 Yen ($143US).