Sony DRU-500A Review

An anonymous reader writes "Just found a nice review of the Sony DRU-500A" This looks to be damn solid DVD burner. It's amazing how much prices on these things have come down. It might be time for me to make my epic film starring CowboyNeal, Samzenpus and Hemos in a moving story about Love, Friendship, and Growing Up in the Face of Adversity. I probably should write a script or something before I start filming. Or not.

Comments

Sony DRU-500A Review

[Dunark]

Isn't Sony one of the big content producers that has their knickers in a knot over piracy? I wonder what kind of content protection features this drive might have that Sony isn't anxious to advertise.

Re:DVD-burners == zip drives

[umStefa]

I agree with you statement that DVD burner's will be olbsolete in a couple of years but disagree that DVD burner's will never catch on. This is because most people (especially computer geeks) only expect their hardware to last a few years.

DVD burner's will be used extensivly for the next few years when the will be replaced by something better. Just like CD's are now being replaced by DVD's

Sony == no go

[BESTouff]

A certain Andre H. (who, at times, is the official Linux IDE maintainer) told recently not to use Sony drives because they have certain firmware "properties" which make them unsuitable to copy copy-protected material. It may seem funny or irrelevant to you, but this means they play dirty tricks with your data.

Re:number 1?

[Chasing Amy]

> how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?

Look at the audience you're speaking to. :-) Many /. users have multiple 80-120GB hard drives, RAID arrays, etc.--and that's on our *home* computers, not just at the office...

And I tell you, once you start downloading SVCDs and MP3s and games (God Bless USENET!), that hard drive space goes quickly. Sure, you could have 500 CD-Rs lying around--but that's inconvenient as hell. Better would be to have it on 60 DVDs, and even better would be to have it on hard drive arrays *backed up* to DVDs.

Not to mention home video recordings--what better way to store them long-term than on high-quality DVDs? Even DV tape is capable of degrading over time, especially with repeated viewings, because it's a tape-based format--whereas the optical DVD format is both more durable (esp. if you make multiple back-ups) and will definitely be long-lasting in terms of format readability since it has been adopted by the movie industry. I have wedding and birth film on DV just waiting for me to be able to afford a DVD-R/W recorder so I can transfer it to DVD and make copies to distribute to friends and family.

Let's face it--the time has come for the recordable DVD to go mainstream. Even set-top DVD recorders are available at Best Buy and Circuit City in the $800 range now, whereas they were $2000 and hard to find last year. In a couple more years they'll be replacing the VCR in most middle-income households, and only the low-income will still be using VCRs instead of DVDRs.