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Taiwanese Company to Mass Produce Rewritable HD Discs
Lucas123 writes "Ritek Corp. plans to start mass producing BD-RE and HD DVD-RE next quarter. 'Initially, however, BD-RE and HD DVD-RE discs will be pricey. The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc, said Eric Ai, a Ritek representative. Prices won't likely come down until other mass disc producers in Taiwan win accreditation to make the discs, and ramp up volumes.'"
Ummm. editors, please?
You can buy a 500gb HD for $100. That equates out to .20 cents a gig for a rewritable device capable of sustained 60-80mb/sec. Factor in that and the cost of the HD and Blueray writeable drives is above $1k and you have a long way to go before these discs are cost effective to use as a storage or backup solution. Right now the sweet spot is eSATA backup solutions. If they were to jump right to 40 and 50gb discs then it would be another story but I expect those to be a pipe dream as far as consumer media goes just like DL-DVD's never really have panned out.
Because Lucas123 previously submitted http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/ 10/002230 when the link for his usernamed pointed to lucas_mearian@computerworld.com . That at least identifies who he is. Furthermore, note that both of the articles Lucas123 submitted both point to computerworld.com articles. (And that's fine; he's not hiding his relationship with the site for the articles he's submitting.) To the point: Whois for Computerworld.com says the administrative, technical and registrant are all from Framingham, MA, in the US.
On the otherhand, if you believe editors come up with the headlines, then the task lies in determining the nationality of CowboyNeal (aka Jonathan Pater). archive.org versions of http://cowboyneal.org/ show him to be a chubby white dude with a beard who listens to music and likes The Grateful Dead. (Which is, like, enough to make the point, right? No?) whois for cowboyneal.org says Rob Malda registered it the domain from MI, and it's not unreasonable to think Jonathan could also be from MI.
There are lots of perfectly decent providers of blank CD's.
Anybody who writes DVD's already knows that there are only a couple of reliable brands of blanks, Like Taiyo Yuden.
If you want to write dual layer DVD's, and expect them to read right on home DVD players, the only brand you can trust is Verbatim.
Now we're talking about HD discs, single and dual layer? There'll be one okay provider, and every third blank is gonna fail.