Pioneer Japan sent out a press release earlier this week, announcing its new 16x Blu-ray Disc writer, the BDR-S09J. This Windows 8.1 compatible drive is 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-S09J 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.
Compared to the BDR-S08J, the BDR-S09J is 20% faster during disc setup and, thanks to an improved algorithm, is 10 minutes faster when verifying the contents of a recorded disc. Along with the usual assortment of features like Pioneer's PowerRead and PureRead3+ technologies, the BDR-S09J introduces a new "surface-oriented mode" that improves the appearance of BD-R discs by reducing the unevenness of the recording surface. The drive also ships with authoring and playback software from CyberLink and is expected to cost about 20,000 Yen ($195US) when it hits stores in late February.
