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DVD Burner Round-up
Julio writes "Gone are the days of storage floppies and zip drives... CD-RW drives do an excellent job in making cheap backups and just about every new computer is equipped with one. As computers and software evolve, so will media. DVD burner drives are already optional equipment on many computers, and will probably become a standard within the next year. Are you ready for a DVD burner? TechSpot has posted a round-up of flagship DVD recorders from Plextor, Panasonic and Pioneer."
-- not until all the standards crap settles down and I know what I get wont be useless 2 months later.
I don't even waste a lot of timing reading up on them. Just waiting on the market to decide what will be dominant.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The real reason zips are going away is the key-chain size USB storage device. Why carry around a 100meg disc and have to have a drive installed on both ends (or have to carry the drive itself around) when you can simply stick this pen-sized piece of plastic into the back of a USB port (one of the reasons new models have additional USB ports up front), and boom!, instant 32-256 meg filesystems.
The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did, so once the majority of windows boxes moved on to 2K and XP, there was nothing stopping them.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm already favoring the Plextor above all others without even reading the article or doing my own comparisons.
The reason for this?
My Plextor CD/RW.
The lesson is this: If you build quality and get people to trust your brand name (based on prior experience), then the 2nd sale is *much* easier.
C|N>K
A while back I needed a large capacity backup device, and I had to choose between CD burners, Zip drives, Jaz drives, and those old optical disks. At the time, because of hardware and media cost, it would have been a tough decision, but by waiting, CD burners came to the forefront and were the most economical choice.
Where does this tie in to DVD burners? Well, they are a bit expensive (although coming down) and I want to wait to see if a better technology is just over the horizon.
There you go, my two cents, more or less.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
They don't cover Pioneer's newly released DVR-A06 (multi-format) or any of Sony's nice burners.
but this review was lame: first of all it's reviewing the Pioneer A05 when the A06 has been available for quite a while (bought one last week, actually) and secondly it does seem quite short on content.
Things that should have been there if this was a decent review:
- speed/performance tests with DVD-RW/DVD+RW media (both, for drives that support both like the A06)
- compatibility tests with DVD+R/DVD-R media (aka burn in one burner, check that it's readable in the others)
- speed tests with CDR/CDRW media
- linux compatibility test (optional, but mentioning xcdroast/prodvd for burning data DVDs and the chain needed to encode video DVDs would've been nice)
- more drives! (LG, LiteOn, Sony + various off-brand ones)
etc. etc. etc.
-- the cake is a lie
1. "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make :(
2. "Expensive". The difference in price from highest to lowest is $45, not too shabby and hardly worth the difference once you take in other considerations (like how many toasters cheap drive a produces). I have fond memories of creating shelves of cd toasters on our $3000 Ricoh 2x CDR when the cd blanks were $25 a piece on this one project. Ouch, thank god we weren't paying for those things, I bet we wen't through over $10K worth of blanks.
3. No checking of valid DVD video. He mentions people wanting to backup their DVD's, but then never tests to make sure any DVD backups actually play in most dvd players. I know for me this is critically important and I would want to see the results of such a test.
I think keychain USB drives are going to be a real sleeper hit.
I would consider one as soon as most of the BIOS makers allow us to boot off of them.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article. Why? Because I looked at the drives they're reviewing and knew it was pointless.
First off, they're reviewing the previous generation of DVD burners. The new Pioneer A06 is a multi-format drive, capable of burning everything but DVD-RAM (which is a dead standard - it required usage of caddies and was incompatible with stand alone DVD players). The Plextor and Panasonic are so-so drives at best. They didn't review the Sony, which is considered the other "best" drive (Pioneer and Sony have been the only two major players until recently), which is also multi-format.
There are a ton of new companies on the DVD burner front too -- LiteOn, NEC, Mitsumi, etc. which I suspect OEM either the Sony or Pioneer drives (no, I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure).
If you want a real resource for DVD burner comparisons, don't even bother with Techspot. Their "review" is about 6 months out of date. Instead go to DVDR Help, which is pretty much the place for anything you could want to know about DVD players, burners, software, etc.
Format wars are essentially over too... most new (and even most 2-3 year old) players can read any of the formats except DVD-RAM. The new burners can write any format you choose, and are at or under $200 now (pricing from NewEgg). Buying a single format burner is just silly.
Honestly though, unless you're burning home videos then you're probably still better off with a CD-RW drive. At under $50 it's hard to go wrong, and there's a lot more computers with CD drives than DVD drives. On the other hand, more games are starting to come out on DVD now (HL2 will be, as well as CD and via Steam), so you may want a DVD drive in your computer (although DVD-ROMs are only $30-40, so CD-RW + DVD-ROM is less than half the price and gives you 2 drives).
Here's the problem: blue laser will be expensive when it first comes out. How many years have we waited for DVD burners to get to the $200 range? They started way up around $1000, and only last year or thereabouts dropped to the sub $300 range.
You're absolutely correct that DVDs are barely usable for backup, but the drives and media are finally reasonably priced. So I could wait one year and buy a $1000 blue laser recorder with media that won't play in a single set-top DVD player sold today (ignoring bakward compatibility with current DVD+/-R), and in the meantime I'm stuck with 30 CD's to back up my 20 gigs of important data.
Or, I can buy my $175 DVD burner, get it all on 5 discs without having to split the data nearly as much, have the ability to back up my DVD movies at good quality, and let it tide me over until the blue lasers (or whatever) come down in price a few years from now.
I just bought a DVD-RW a few weeks ago, and I love it. Just thought I'd present my justification as an opposing viewpoint.
Not pointless at all. When it's so hard to actually burn a movie that will play in your DVD player, it pays to test it once on a RW then burn it as a final on a real disk.
and had a DVD burner 2 years ago. No, Apple does'nt innovate anything, do they? :/
Seriously, my MP3 collection is about 15 GB, and that is just the stuff I have taken the time to rip. My CD collection would easily be 10 times that, if I ever get around to digitizing them.
Granted, putting 15 GB on DVDs would be time consuming, but compared to CDRs, it is phenominal. I am kind of holding out for the blue lasers though.
What could you use a DVD+-R for? How about imaging your system for instant restores? Hard to do with CDRs. Disk drives are getting bigger, and we are finding ways to fill them.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't see much point in buying that 20G drive, when the 200 Petabyte drives will be out in 2025.
The Sony models that do four formats (DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW) at 4x speed are going for US$225.
None of the reviewed burners do that.
To be left out of the compairision is like discussing hard drives without mentioning Western Digital.
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why would you use +R for archiving vs -R? +R media is definitely more expensive around here BTW
-- the cake is a lie
The biggest users of Zip disks has to be the print/publishing business. Ad agencies, book publishers, print shops, et al, all have stacks and stacks and STACKS of Zip disks lying around.
The first biggest problem was the price. The per disk cost is still up around $10. I worked at a book publisher and then an ad agency, and I can't tell you how many Zip disks we sent out that were unreturned, in spite of the fact that everyone we send them to knows about the high media cost.
Second, Iomega took too freakin long to get to 750 MB. They were upgraded to 250 MB just as the first wave of CD-RW drives were hitting the market. 650 MB CD-R media prices were in free fall, finally settling at around $1/per, just about the time Iomega came out with the 750 MB zip. A 750 MB Zip disk costs about $15; who the fsck is going to pay 1500% more for only 15% more space? And then who would you send a 750 MB Zip disk to?
And now that broadband internet is common in the business world, transferring 100 MB online is not a big deal anymore. Iomega has become irrelevant.
Who is going to be the standard is irrelevant. -R has a better support on existing devices, cheaper media and all devices (existing and future) are going to be able to read it.
Where's the risk on buying a DVD-R ?
Even if +R wins the battle in the end, who cares? All your DVD-Rs are not going to the trash can: You can still read them on every device. And you're going to find blank media for some time anyways.
Now if you want to buy the more expensive and less compatible standard, go ahead...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The article starts off saying "With 300 gig drives hitting pavement...." DVD drives hold about 4G of data. It doesn't sound realistic to back up a large amount of data in chunks that are approx 1/100th the size of the media. It's in the same ballpark as saying you'll use floppy drives to back up a CD's worth of data. Sure, technically you can do it... but it's not realistic.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Ok, I'll try and explain it once more.
Let's take the analogy of VHS vs. Betamax. People that went with the (now dead) Betamax format are screwed now because all their tape are as good as dead. In this case going eith the technically superior format was a mistake.
How come the DVD format war doesn't apply here?
You CAN read a DVD-R on a DVD+R drive. You CAN read a DVD+R on a DVD-R drive.
Now let's say you buy a DVD-R (because it's technically superior). All DVD players (ROM, boxes, Video etc...) will ALWAYS support your format. In fact you can read your DVD-R in most DVD players that were release before the DVD-R discs even existed.
So when DVD-R is going to die (if that ever happens), all your DVD-R that you have burned in the meantime (music, movies, data, etc...) are still going to play in ALL the players out there.
That's the main difference between DVD and VCR analogy. When Betamax died, you couldn't watch your videotapes anywhere because you needed a BETAMAX VCR to read them.
In the case of DVD-R or DVD+R, you don't need a DVD+R or DVD-R drive to read them, you need a DVD Drive. And they are not likely to die soon.
But why bother. I already explained that in your parent post. You probably didn't read through it anyways. So you're not likely to read through this one either...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
One thing for OSX users to keep in mind is that iDVD will only work with the Apple drives. However the Apple drives are actually Pioneer drives. So if you want to buy a DVD writer and use the rather nice iDVD you should get a Pioneer DVR-103 or DVR-104.
There is a changing preference from the journalists, but basically, here are the technical facts:
...). If you click on DVD-R, you get 1484 results. Click on DVD+R: 1045 player only matches.
1. You usually find faster burners for +R than for -R (in the order of 2.4 vs. 2)
2. DVD-R plays in a wider range of set top boxes / Video dvd players. This means that the movies of your holidays that you're going to burn will play on a wider ranges of video players with the -R technology than the +R.
For an evidence of my assertion, go to http://www.dvdrhelp.com/ and click on "DVD-Players" on the left. This list represent "all" the DVD players available on the market since the creation of the DVD-Video (or pretty close) and can tell you which DVD player plays which formats (DVD-R, DVD+R, CDRW, CDR,
3. DVD-R are cheaper than DVD+R, DVD-RW are cheaper than DVD+RW. Just go check the prices on amazon.com or anywhere else (Amazon might not be the best example)
4. DVD+R is backed up by bigger companies with bigger bucks than DVD-R. This explains IMHO the good press that DVD+R is having these days. It will probably not help them impose their standard as "THE" standard.
5. Most DVD-R burners read DVD+R, where most DVD+R burners don't read DVD-R. Another good reason to buy a DVD-R burner: You can read every single DVD burned.
Giving that, I bought a Pioneer A04 19 months ago and I don't regret it. Even if DVD-R is to die (and I doubt it) I will not regret having bought a DVD-R.
As I said, my DVD-R are DVDs, they will play forever (or at least for as long as they last as a media) in any (or most) DVD player.
Write boring code, not shiny code!