Combined DVD Burners Coming Soon

MonMotha writes "Sony recently announced plans to make a DVD burner capable of supporting both the - (DVD-R and DVD-RW) as well as the + (DVD+RW and DVD+R) standards for burnable DVD media. This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. The drive will not support the older DVD-RAM due to it's plastic casing."

Comments

cost

[Squarewav]

its the cost thats the problem not the standard , a genaric dvd burner runs around 264$(pricewatch)(400$ at my local comp usa) a lot more then most people are willing to spend when they rarely use more then a normal cdr. Its cheaper to buy a hard drive

Lower price will speed adoption not this

[j_dot_bomb]

Drives are min $300 for a -R/-Ram.
But many people have CD-Rs.
DVD-R and CD-R media both cost $.2 per gig now.
The startup cost is so much it seems better
to buy a few IDE drives and wait till the price
comes down. The only good thing is the (linear)
rewriteable -RW which are as cheap as -R which is
great.

And why not include -RAM? Its media is cheaper
than +RW (the most similar), and it is so established.

Well isn't that all nice and great...

[Loki_1929]

Now just please tell me when HP is going to own up to their promise to provide owners of the DVD 100i the capability to burn DVD-r's (one way or another). At this point, I'm leaning towards avoiding any first generation product offered from anyone, and specifically avoiding any and all HP purchases in the future. If you're going to promise something, make sure it's possible first; and don't edit the FAQ later without so much as telling anyone to make it look like you never promised what you did, in fact, promise. Remember, the people who buy the first-gen products are the ones who help shape what hits mainstream.

Limited Demand, or Lack of Standards?

[Cheesewhiz]

"This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. "

I disagree that the lack of a single unified standard has had a significant depressive influence on the sale of recordable DVD drives. I think that it's rather a lack of demand.

In other words, how many people actually have a driven requirement to burn DVDs? While most of us geeks would think that it's an immensely desirable thing, in actuality, the average PC user doesn't have a need for DVD-R technology.

While the media has been making it sound like all the rage, home-producing video DVDs is actually not yet widespread. It's great use of quality technology, but the average Joe doesn't do it...yet.

Storage space is extremely cheap -- $100 for 120 GB IDE drives. To the average user, that's an immense, almost dauntingly large amount of space which they'll probably never use. Why spend extra on a DVD recordable drive, and several bucks each on DVD media when you don't need that much space (4.7 GB per disc, usually) in a transportable form?

The fact is, most people don't need DVD-recordable drives. If they did, they'd purchase one regardless of the lack of a single unified standard, as long as the product does what it needs to. That's a fairly typical consumer mindset with computer technology recently -- "who cares about the standards, because they'll all be different in another month!"

On the Apple side, it's profitable for them to offer DVD-R technology as a standard, because their users are typically more multimedia-centric, and have suitable user-friendly tools for the most basic to the most advanced users to utilize the technology to its fullest. For most PC-users, it's merely purchasing a machine with superfluous technology.

Got lucky on Philips under $100

[Sean Clifford]

Got lucky in Wal-Mart and picked up 2 Philips DVD+RW burners for $78.84 apiece when they were selling for ~$480 each. Talk about rolling back the prices. They must have screwed up and thought they were selling CD-RW drives 'cause I haven't seen them since.

The real use for DVD/R

[smallstepforman]

Its suprising to see that some people fail to see the larger picture which DVD-R brings. Walk into any Blockbuster/VideoEzy/Video library, rent a movie overnight, stick it into your PC and start ripping and recompressing, and burn the movie onto your DVD-R. Total cost for movie ownership - $5 for rental and $5 for blank DVD-R. This will get cheaper, since blank media prices will fall. Most video libraries also offer a rent 5 movies for $10 deal, so you can get 5 movies for $35, or $7 each at current prices. Of course, you have to factor in burner and PC ammortisation and electricity, but you get the general idea. When blank disks cost $2 each, you're looking at $4 for pirated movie disks. Great value in any book, when you take into consideration that most movies cost $20 or so. You miss out on the menus and extra features, but you can always burn them onto another disk. The best thing is that you dont get to see the FBI style warnings before every disk (telling you how wrong it is to do what you've just done).

The best part about this situation is that free software already exists which can rip a DVD and compress it to fit on a 4.38Gb (4.7G) disk at the push of a button. Just hit start, flip disks 2 hours later, and hit burn. If you have a second DVD-ROM, you dont even have to hit burn - insert the two disks (original and blank), and just hit Start.

Of course, the MPAA will catch onto this soon, but its too late to introduce new counter measures. The cat is out of the bag.

Re:ahh, cost

[Zeinfeld]

I just looked at dirtcheapdrives and they are quoting $450 for the low end DVD-RW drives and $700 for the higher end ones. Media is $125 for 20 disks.

In comparison I have seen CD-RW drives for $80 and media for under $1 a disk. The price differential is simply not justified by a mere ten-fold increase in capacity. It is pretty obvious that the price of the drives will be slashed to reasonable levels before they catch on on a scale large enough to make the media affordable.

The big problem is that there is absolutely no backup media on the market that is as cost effective as an IDE hard disk drive! An IDE drive with a capacity of 120Gb can be bought for just over $1 per GB and requires only a $20 caddy to make it into a removable medium. If they would make them hot swappable there would be no reason to use anything else. They are faster than and have a higher capacity than tape drive systems costing tens of thousands. Best of all even if a drive fails entirely you have a chance at recovery - try that with a mag tape that has been chewed in a faulty drive.

I tried to explain this idea to the Iomega investors some time ago when they were convinced that everyone would be queuing up to buy Jaz and the clik! disk would be taking over the world. DVD-RW still suffers from the same sort of economics as the Jaz drive - media too expensive to use as a backup, drive system too expensive.