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First DVD+R9 Burners Reviewed
Hack Jandy writes "DVD dual-layer burners finally seem ready for the public - today, a review of the Sony DRU-700A was posted by Anandtech, and teasers of the BenQ 830A posted at CDRInfo.com. Unfortunately, the drives seem too slow to to really warrant a purchase."
1) But I just bought a other DVD-RW!!
2) They'll come down in price eventually
3) That's way to slow for me! I want gigabytes/sec!
4) Dual-sides? I think we should be writing on the
edges as well by now.
I write code.
I'm sure the MPAA will try their best to stop these drives from going on the market. In the same sense that the RIAA tried to stop CD burners when they first emerged.
From Wherever to Whenever.
If they hold a full, uncompressed movie, they're good enough.
Albuquerque PC
Or is speed overrated?
I'm not saying I like taking my time with a DVD to do some sweet authoring down by the fire. But it seems to me, at least, data density, features and price are the determining factors. I'm not banging out a couple hundred copies of my greatest DOA:Volleyball matches (Unrated edition) for sale on ebay, so the time it takes to burn one isn't exactly critical.
No offense but how can a device that does something that has never been 'do-able' before too slow...to slow as comapared to what?! What do you use to burn a 9G dvd?
P.S. why in the heck won't this thing let me post on the article BLAH..I don't hve an account why are you discriminating against me becuase I don't wish to register?
Bah! I just got rid of my 2x CD burner last week!
I haven't been keeping up- I predicted the end of the year. Then again, reading the review I'm not sure I'd want one now anyway.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Did you read the same article? The first page clearly shows both formats.
The only format it didn't support was DVD-RAM.
Dual layer burners ? Great.
How about dual layer media ? Any mention of availability and price ?
Yes, it's overrated by most people. Most don't need to burn 50 DVDs/day, and if they do, they've got the funds to invest in more burners.
The problem specifically, I have found, is that people burn at top speed, which makes their system mostly unusable during the burn due to IO load -- so they complain that it takes "too long" as they must 'wait' for it to complete.
What I do instead is burn at a slower rate (2x), which doesn't starve my IO, meaning I can actually do other things while "waiting" for the burn to complete.
PS. SCSI-trolls can stay away.
PSS. My first CDR burner topped out at 1x and had a 64Kbyte buffer. Only stable in Win 3.11 due to the small buffer.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I use my drive for data backup. At less than $1 a disc, I do full weekly backups of all my (in-house generated) business data for my engineering firm. At the current rate, I'll cross the 4.3GB threshold sometime in fall '04. These will be out in quantity just in time. I know, there are ways to get better compression out of a (mostly) static data set than backing it all up, but recovery is far faster this way. If my drive dies, I can restore the entire thing in less than 20 minutes. If I screw up a single file, I can just go to the most recent backup - not have to sift through a multi-generational backup set. And with what I saved on dedicated backup software, I can buy a new DVD+9 drive and another year's worth of discs.
(yes, my main applications drive is bigger than 4.3G...it's about 60GB. That's why it gets imaged by Ghost on a removable drive once a week. Yes, I've tested it...swap the primary with the backup and it's transparent. I sleep much better knowing that in the event of a major HD crash, I'm less than $100 billable time from being back in business)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Thanks to the lack of session closing, we can burn 2 DVD+R5 discs in less than 15 minutes, or one DVD+R9 disc in 45 minutes.
Not half bad!
-Imidazole2
So, who's going to be the first person to explain to me why we can't fit the same amount of data on one of these as movie companies can fit on theirs?
graspee
Or maybe I'm just desperate having purchased a vanilla DVD burner a few months ago...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This may be slightly off topic, but can someone tell me which is the better burner/media to get, the +R or the -R? Also, I've seen some media that says +R and the RW but it's only write once. What is the skinny on all of these R's?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
stop clicking the "next page" links every paragraph and try this out! anandtech.com review [anandtech.com]
-eric
If this doesn't kick-start HD-DVD, nothing will. The last obstacle to conventional DVD piracy has been overcome. Never mind the speed - now we can copy^H^H^H^Hmake fair-use backups of full commercial DVDs, including extras and without further compression.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
A few things:
1. DVD-/+RW drives, dont need to spin the discs as fast, they can read more data, even spinning at slower speeds, due to how the data is compacted on the surface of the disc.
2. Multiple heads and tracks have already been discussed in many a "look a new harddrive" thread, all ended the same, it's too hard (ie. expensive) to syncronize the writing, you could not get coherent data, unless maybe you wanted to consider it as disc partitions, you can have 4gig here, and 4 gig here, but no 8gig files.
3. If you're looking for fast, large mass storage, and dont care if other drives can read them, get a tape drive, until then, backwards compatability is important, I can get a 16x DVD drive for around $30 CAD, it can read (At least) DVD-9's, if changing to a four head writer means all existing DVD drives and DVD Players are obsolete, it's not gonna happen, especially since a 4x head writer would probably cost five times as much (no, not 4x as much) as a regular one.
4. Whats the big hurry to write DVD's?! thats a pantload of data, take the time and do it right!
seriously though, knowing it's going to take a 1/2 hour to an hour to burn a CD (or dvd, I'm going by past experience here though) has made me consider much more carefully what data goes on, as opposed to "andddddddd DONE... oh... SH!T, I forgot this one".
Your post is the most underrated yet in regards to the Disney commercials and menus. Very few fully know what you mean about ripping Disney DVDs so your sibling doesn't have to touch the original and what a pain all those commercials & menus really are, Especially when you change a DVD every 45 minutes or so. I recently bought my first DVD burner and ripped out those 30 minute commercials with menus; you simply insert the DVD and walk away. My wife kisses me every time the movie automatically start to play and the children get quiet for a few minutes of the day. My burner has paid for itself many times over with the amount of time I saved by not having to forward through that garage.
When the article said that the drive's burn speed was too slow "to really warrant a purchase", I was expecting 2+ hour burn times or something. 45 minutes isn't bad at all, considering that this is a new type of burner, with a new (to the consumer) type of media.
Remember waaaay back when the first Pioneer DVD+R drives came out? IIRC, it took hours to burn a 4GB DVD. I'd consider 4 hours too slow to warrant buying a drive, not 45 minutes.
I think the tradeoff of speed vs storage space is well worth it, personally.
The article doesn't talk about it, but apparently DVDR9 has poor set-top player compatibility, at least currently. Whether this can be fixed via firmware, better media, or not is still unknown. Sorry I don't have a link, but I think both cdrinfo and dvdplusrw.org have comments about it on their boards.
I would think there is at least some communication between the different divisions of Sony.
This would be the same Sony whose music division created copy-protected CD albums that couldn't be used with the electronics division's Net-MD player's ripping system, yes?
Don't buy a single format burner -- buy one that does +/- R/RW.
My personal opinion is that -R media has a slight edge in compatibility with a few older DVD-ROM drives and a few more older DVD players; DVD-R is endorsed by the DVD Forum and its specification is "official." This distinction is disappearing as new players and -ROM drives almost always support both formats.
I use -R exclusively, but primarily because I got a -R/RW drive dirt cheap, I knew worked in my DVD player, and it's the only write-once format supported by my set-top DVD recorder, the Panasonic DMR-E80H. It also only supports -RAM media for rewritables, which means that my next drive is going to be a +/- R/RW/RAM drive (if I can find one, most of the ones I've seen have been -R/-RW/RAM).
The nicest thing about the -RAM discs are the caddied discs; I can just toss them in a drawer and the caddy keeps them safe with no handling. Other than that, they're expensive and hard to find (especially in a caddy).
My personal guess is that - and + formats will remain "tied" until Blu-Ray or DVD-HD writables become affordable.
This was confusing me, too, but I found this chart in the DVD FAQ which does seem to indicate that pressed dual layer DVDs are also limited to 7.95GB.
Can any DVD experts confirm that pressed dual layer discs have the same storage capacity as DVD+R DL discs?
No one mentions those, but they will be an issue.
One DVD9 will be more expensive than purchasing two separate DVD5s. What's the point in using it, then? I could see if current DVD-R prices dropped to 50 cents a disc and the DVD9's took over the $1-2 range, but it doesn't look as if it will be that way.
And compatibility... if your DVD player is able to play DVD-R and DVD-RW, would it play DVD-R/RW DL without any issues? It might be fine for data backup, but if you can't copy movies and watch them, then that's a problem.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
You just calculated the figures for 24-bit RGB. As I said in my original post, I was assuming YUV 420 - as this is the most common format for uncompressed video.
In this example the Y (luma) component is 720x576, but the U and V (chroma) components are subsambpled to 352x288 each. This results in half the amount of raw data versus 24-bit RGB at virtually no loss in perceived quality.
DvdShrink's quality is awful.
Honestly, I only use it to strip out what I don't need to make an uncompressed backup. Then I fire up Intervideo DVD Copy to shrink down and burn--it has absolutely the best compression I've ever seen. Often times you can't tell the difference between the original and the copy. Not to mention, it's much faster than DVD Shrink's "Deep Analysis."
Seriously, I've been putting off buying a DVD burner until these new dual-layers came out.
First thing I'm gonna do is backup my Extended Edition LOTR DVDs (all 8 of 'em...soon to be 12 when ROTK comes out). I'm sick of fumbling with those big foldout booklets, and the collector's geek in me doesn't want to be handling all that stuff all the time and instead keep it in the box.
8,547,991,552 bytes (7.96GB) less the overhead of your file system of choice.
Sony DL Info
DVD Formats
Disc Max User Capacity Note :DVD5 4.7GB Single layer Single sided disc
:DVD9 8.5GB Double layer Single sided disc
:DVD10 9.4GB Single layer Double sided disc
:DVD18 17.1GB Double layer Double sided disc
:DVD-R 4.7 GB Single layer Single sided disc
:DVD-RW 4.7 GB Single layer Single sided disc
:DVD+RW 4.7 GB Single layer Single sided disc
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TKM