I remember when Blu-ray drives for computers first starting coming to the market. The internal drives were over $1000 to purchase making them far too expensive for most of the people interested in them to afford. Thankfully, as things happen in the technology industry, prices have dropped significantly today.

Pioneer has announced a new Blu-ray writer called the BDR-2203 that can burn dual-layer Blu-ray discs at 8x speeds. The best part is that the internal optical drive retails for $249.99, about a quarter of what Blu-ray drives sold for not so long ago.

Pioneer says that the drive can write 25GB of data to a single-layer BD disc in 15 minutes and 50GB of data takes 30 minutes to write. The drive also comes bundled with software for authoring discs. The multi-format drive can write to all common Blu-ray, DVD, and CD formats.

Pioneer