Pioneer knocks up low-cost Blu-ray drive

PIONEER HAS launched a new Blu-ray PC-based drive at a pretty attractive price for enthusiasts.

The BDC-S02, which was pimped out at IDF in China this week, will go for an estimated retail price of $300 which, as anyone watching the news this week will know, is about five quid in real money.

The drive can play standard Blu-ray movies, which will make it a good pairing with a new Radeon or GeForce card to support hardware H.264 decoding. It can also play back and record BD-R and BD-RE discs (both single and dual layer).

The price is significantly lower than most stand-alone Blu-ray players, as well as the price of other PC-only drives up until now. Sony still touts the PS3 as the best value next-gen player at $600 or so.

Expect the drive to start tipping up at all the usual places in the next few weeks. How long before, like DVD, drive prices really start to tumble? µ