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Taiwanese Makers Will Squeeze DVD Recorder Prices
GeXX points out this PC World article predicting vastly lower prices on DVD recorders, in large part because cheap, high-volume Taiwanese manufacturers will have a greater percentage of the market, currently dominated by Japanese makers.
But, living in germany, the taxes on DVD-recorders (german, sorry) will probably eat up the win for the consumer.
Google translation here.
Article mentions recorders @ $220 a piece. Considering I could buy perfectly ok recorder @ $80 at the local shop... Well, when was the article really written? I guess prices did plunge since then alreayd.
although one might see this as good, you have to wonder whether or not the extremely cheap products will be of good quality, not to say that they won't, but if they are significantly cheaper you have to be at least a bit wary... but hey this is great, because everyone will have to drop their prices to compete, meaning that all the buyers win on this... but you have to consider the companies who are currently selling their burners for high prices... what happens if they have to cut their prices in half to stay competitive? they could go under, which would be a bad thing..
This is kind of odd, really; I can get good capable-of-all-relevant-formats DVD burners for about $100CAD (about $75USD) each. Good CD burners cost around $60CAD. So what, DVD burners are going to go down to that level soon? Not that I won't be happy, but it's kind of hard to believe. The March of Technology goes on, I suppose.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
heres another source I found: DVD recorder prices fall as production surges in Taiwan
But it apears that they are already cheap if you know where to shop.
I haven't been following the DVD formats, so can someone tell me if the DVD+/-RW thing has been settled yet? And whether we'll have to go through the whole thing again with DVD-HD and Blu-Ray? And whether for backups I'm not better off just buying some cheap IDE hard disks and put them in an external enclosure?
...will they be able to copy the custom DVD's the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is creating?
DVD Burner - A 5.25" boxy thing you put into your computer case. Almost gratis.
DVD Recorder - A stand-alone consumer electronics device you connect to your TV-set. Includes shiny packaging and remote control. No computer needed. Costs a bundle.
Right, as for the pollution issue: well, yeah. Again, the little 'energy-saving' and other stickers add to the price, and let's not wonder why products are (hardly) never manufactured in our countries anymore, where there are environment-protection and workers' rights laws (well, I speak for my own here). But whatever the side effects of mass production are, blame the buyer, not the maker. He'll only manufacture stuff that sells.
These days, it's actually not uncommon to be looked at strangely if you pull a 3.5" disc out of your briefcase. In a few years, a 3.5" disc will be as much of an exotic, strange relict as 5.25" discs are today. Many people these days, have never even seen or used a ZIP drive or a magnetic tape.
As DVD records become cheaper (I rememeber when they were around $1500 not too long ago and people would ask why anyone would want a DVD burner) and, perhaps more importantly, DVD media reaches price levels currently associated with CD-R media more and more low-budget computers will come equipped with DVD-burners and not CD-RW drives.
That's, at least in my humble opinion, one of the main reason CD-RW never really took off. There was just no reason to use rewriteable CDs. With relatively high-capacitiy recordable DVDs becoming widely available, CD-Rs just became so cheap there was no reason to reuse a CD-R.
In a couple of years, CD-R will only be used to burn audio CDs. Most computers can already read DVDs so there's no reason for DVD-R/DVD+R not to be used even more widely.
And the next DVD standard is already in the pipelines. Early adopters, new developments, consumer demand and, probably, the industry's demand for IP protection will eventually push the prices down enough for the new standards to replace the current DVD standard. The only thing that I think could interfere with this cycle is distributed computing along with truely distributed storage.
Outside hardware manufacturers are less likely to be controlled by hollywood so hopefully we can get cheap hardware that also ignores drm right? - broadcast flags, fast-forward flags etc. If the market can be flooded with these things then people will be less likely to take the MPAAs bullshit on broadcast flags. Technically they wouldnt be able to use the DVD logo but its not like the music industry cares about messing with formats (RIAA and MPAA are pretty much the same thing).
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