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."

Comments

CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip drives

[acroyear]

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.

Some comments

[binaryDigit]

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.

Re:CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip dri

[VivianC]

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.

Last generation drives, no Sony

[Zathrus]

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).

Re:New Technology

[CaseyB]

I don't see much point in buying that 20G drive, when the 200 Petabyte drives will be out in 2025.

Re:NEC 1100A

[Pieroxy]

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...