Pioneer Blu-ray drive launched in early 2006 images 1 The US electronics company claims the next-generation optical disc drive, powered by Sony's BDR-101A, will be widely traded in the first quarter of next year.

This will not be a popular drive for everyone. The market that Pioneer aims to be is a professional content creator who needs to make sure BD-ROM movies work smoothly before it is mass produced and delivered to consumers.

Pioneer drive can burn BD at 2x speed. It can also burn DVD-R and DVD + R 8x as well as DVD-RW and DVD + RW 4x. The company will only announce prices when equipment appears on the market.

Blu-ray drives are competing fiercely with HD-DVD drives. Both drives use green lasers to read and write information on a small area, thus storing more data on a single disk. This is especially important when high resolution videos become popular.

However, Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats are not compatible with each other, thus inevitably a fierce battle between the two camps and inadvertently slowing down the consumer acceptance process because they will wait until when determining which standard will win.