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.

I could settle this would standards mess with $200

[Prince_Ali]

I could settle this would standards mess with $200. As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard. My refusal to buy a DVD writer is the only thing keeping the industry from standardizing.

Better than tape

[yroJJory]

I gave up using tape for backups because it was too costly and time-consuming. For my audio engineering work, DVD-R is fantastic. I recently did a project that archived neatly onto 6 DVDs. That cost me a grand total of $20 for media and about the same amount of time to archive as did my Ecrix VXA1. However, the archives are infinitely more accessible, as I can open the disc on any machine with a DVD-ROM, regardless of having a VXA drive around. And, the files are instantly accessible, without having to restore from tape.

DVD-RW is fantastic!

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).

My Experiences

[Gailin]

I bought the Pioneer DVR-A05 dvd-r/rw burner. I must say that I love it! I, like a lot of people, have a home file server that I share all my files and music from. I had been making periodic backups onto other hard drives, but have found it be cumbersome and expensive. In an afternoon I was able to back up my server and all other important information onto dvd-r's and save a lot of money to boot.

If you shop around for media, you can find blanks pretty cheap. I think the ones I'm using now cost 1.26 a piece, which is much cheaper than hard drives.

As for movies, I bought my dvd player and burner around the same to time to ensure compatibility. I also have found that ALL of my friends home DVD players can play movies that I have recorded. And I think it would be fair to say, that most of the players have been purchased within the last two years. Of course, your experiences may vary, I have just had great luck with dvd-r/rw.

G

Useless review

[ErMaC]

This set of reviews is absolutely useless. They don't do into covering the two most important things in any DVD-Burner: Player compatability and DVD-blank compatability.

All +/-R crud aside (and most of the newer drives like the Sony DRU500 and Pioneer A06 do dual format anyway), the biggest issue for someone who's going to buy a DVD burner is whether the discs they burn will play in their set top player, and other people's. This article doesn't even consider that fact.

Other posters will touch on this I'm sure - DVD's aren't the ideal backup solution. They're alright, but really what DVD is good for is storing video. I think the number of people buying DVD burners to use for backup is a whole lot smaller than the audience who actually want to make DVDs they can play on their television, or bring to their friend's house.

Finally, all these drives are OLD news. The A05 has already been superceded by the A06 from Pioneer, the review doesn't mention a Sony drive at all, and Plextor has just announced their new 8x DVD+R/4x DVD-R burner that will come out sometime in the next month. Perhaps if this review was posted maybe 4 months ago it would be relevant.

I could recommend a bunch of sites with relevant reviews, but I'd rather not get them slashdotted. Check the almighty google for reviews, hopefully ones which aren't practically devoid of useful information like this one.

Re:UUB keychains

[christopherfinke]

I'm trying to talk the Promotions guy into giving these away with our logo on them. I figure that the 64 Meg ones can't be that expensive in bulk.

Hey, I'm a big fan of yourcompanysname. You can send mine to

Chris Finke
18165 County Road 50
Hamburg, MN 55339 USA

Keep up the great work!

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.

Fragile Media

[poptones]

I still have a TDK CD here that was burned for me nearly a decade ago. It's a gold disc with the blue tint, it's covered with little scratches, but for the most part it's still usable (although the data - like a win95 install, office95, etc isn't).

Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster. I've lost I don't know how many thousands of files like this (no, not just porn) and it's not just discs from my own drives; I can watch one of four discs of the scifi channel's "Dune" series because the other three, which I got from a friend, simply refuse to play. Why? I don't know; there's no shmutz on the disc, and I can't find a single hole.

And that's the other thing: what happened to EFM and redundancy and storing nonconsecutive bits on the disc? A single tiny pinhole should NOT be making an entire file (or, if it's big enough, an entire disc) unreadable. The TDK I got a decade ago can still be read through many scratches. I can only assume it's because of the increased speed we all record at - which tells me that these DVDs - already an incredibly fragile format even in "store bought" form - are going to be even less reliable than CDR. No way in hell will I ever again trust my data to a CD "backup" alone - much less a DVD.

So far as I can see all these are good for is making DVDs - and who cares about those old fashion things any more? Sure, it's alright for bringing home a box of bits from the store - but if you're going to trade with a friend it's just as easy to stick a hard drive in a box. And the data transfer is faster, and the media, ultimately, far more reliable.

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...