Just when you weren’t really sure where the interest in Blu-ray Disc was going, here comes the Pioneer BDR-205 Blu-ray Disc burner, a drive that can burn at speeds of up to 12x–and that’s for both single- and dual-layer BD-R media. (Though, confusingly, the read speed for BD-R and BD-RE tops out at 8x. See the spec sheet on the web site for all of the gory speed details.)

The drive doesn’t skimp on the good specs; it reads and writes pretty much every optical format we can think of offhand (even DVD-RAM), it uses the SATA interface and there’s a 4MB buffer.

The best part? The MSRP is only $249… so street price for this drive will surely be even less. While optical drives have been a commodity item for years at this point, it’s great to see that there’s still some innovation left. But at the same time, prices will only keep going down…