HP DVD100i DVD+RW Burner Tested

An anonymous reader writes: "I'm fairly sure this is the first review of a DVD+RW drive. Looks like it fared well in testing. The only downsides to the 100i are slow DAE with audio CD's, lousy manuals, and it can't read DVD-RW (note the dash instead of the plus) discs. Still a tad expensive at 599USD though. Are you reading, Santa?" I want this as a heavy-duty *external* drive :)

Comments

HP optical products are crap, IMHO

[nsayer]

I have had very bad luck with HP Optical products in the past. The net effect really is that you're not buying the product in question, you're renting it for the warranty period. This is because they self destruct at day # (warrenty + 1), and their out-of-warranty repair charge is (price of new drive * 0.99).

Worst Review I've ever read

[monkeydo]

Where do these reviewers come from? This review reads like a 5th grade book report.

You would think the DVD-RW format would sound like the perfect solution. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. Probably the biggest issue right now is that not all DVD video players or DVD-ROM drives can play these discs. The other problem is recording video. This format does not support efficient encoding of video using variable bit rates. This limits the recording speed to only 1x and it can take a good 1 or 2 hours to write a DVD movie.

You would think there would be a better solution. So did a few other companies. These companies got together and formed the DVD+RW Alliance. The DVD+RW Alliance was originally formed by Dell, HP, Mitsubishi Chemical, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, Thomson Multimedia and Yamaha. You can see that this group was made up of leaders in the optical storage industry as well as in many other aspects of computing. Their solution was the DVD+RW format.

If these companies would give _me_ free equipment, I guarantee reviews that are at least written by someone with a better grasp of the written language.