Pioneer Japan sent out a press release today, announcing two new external 16x Blu-ray Disc writers, the BDR-X12J-UHD And BDR-X12JBK. Both drives are equipped with a USB 3.1 Gen.1 interface and are 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-X12J-UHD And BDR-X12JBK also write 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.

Pioneer BDR X12J UHD

The BDR-X12J-UHD ups the ante even further with its ability to play back Ultra HD Blu-ray content. When connected to a Windows 10 PC with the included PowerDVD software and an i7 or i5 Kaby Lake (or higher) processor, users can play back movies at 4K resolutions. The drive also features Pioneer's PureRead 4+ and RealTime PureRead technologies which improve the reading performance of scratched and dirty discs and reproduce the original sound quality of a CD. 


The BDR-X12J-UHD And BDR-X12JBK both come bundled authoring and playback software from CyberLink and are expected to hits stores in mid-January.