About 4 years ago, Bluray discs came into the stores and finally eradicated
it’s archrival HD-DVD. Meantime, there are also Recordables that allow you
to burn 25 or 50(dual-layer) GB of data onto them. Quite a lot of space for
Photos, Movies or the like if you use this medium for backup purposes.

If it comes to HD-material, you’ll need lots of space to burn a 90-minutes-movie onto a disc.

Nowadays, there are movies that come in several versions onto the market and one might want to push them onto one disc. Bluray authoring tools are already available but mostly the problem is that the movies burst over the 50GB-barrier and thus won’t fit onto the common BD media.

BDR-XL shall exactly kick in here. With a total available space of 100GB, this disc holds double the data a usual BDR can hold.

The media may be roughly at 50US$/80US$ making this a real expensive backup media compared to today’s HDD prices.

However the media is resistant against most usual environmental influencs but sun or rough treatment of the data side. the recording layer is completely covered by the carbosilicate substrate which is 0.6mm thick. Great mechanical force would be needed to puncture the recording layer now unlike it’s ancestor, the DVD where the recording layer is directly applied onto the carbosilicate substrate and thus only be protected by a labelling and protection film.

So for backup purposes where the media is supposed to stay intect for several years, this media may be the right choice. With the flood of data that’s around today and residing on most of the home computers, this media is also ready for dealing with these.

The decay of the CDR is once again accelerated as this media is simply unsuitable for HD material, be it music libraries or movies.

Goodbye CDR, make space for DVD-R and BD-R (XL)!

Oh wait… one more thing:

The burners are on the market now and Pioneer is the pioneer here (what a word game!) offering you two types of the burner.

These are:

BDR-PR1M
BDR-PR1MA

The main difference between both is, that the BDR-PR1M can check discs for errors just as the recording has finished. Seems as if this is no longer part of the burning program.

About the pricings: BDR-PR1M is at 2.800US$ and it’s smaller-featured brother BDR-PR1MA is available for “just” 1.400US$

Quite expensive as there is already a Pioneer BDR-207EBK which is one tenth of the price of the smaller type. If it’s just the 12x speed you can write the BD-XL media with, I find this a very hefty price tag and most of the people will go with the BDR-207EBK which is also capable of writing  BDR-XL with up to 4 layers (100GB disc).

By now I was unable to find any other advantages the BDR-PR1M series has over the cheaper XL burners… so why fork out so much money for the BDR-PR1M series then?