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.'"

Comments

Despite?

[raehl]

$10 retail on something that costs $5 to produce is pretty standard.

Re:Despite?

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, exactly. Imagine for a minute all the highly mechanized third-world sweatshops that pay pennies per hour. It can't cost more than a dollar to make a shirt, and what does it retail in America for? $35.

100% markup doesn't seem bad by comparison.

Taiwan is NOT "Thai" !

[Golgafrinchan]

Ritek is a Taiwanese company.

The headline implies that Ritek is located in Thailand.

Way to go, American geography experts!

Re:Taiwan is NOT "Thai" !

[L. VeGas]

Way to go, American geography experts! How do you know they live in North America? They could be from Canada, you know.

Re:Taiwan is NOT "Thai" !

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yay

[blackmonday]

This was the same story for CDR, DVDR, etc. Eventually, a spindle will be available for 12 bucks at Fry's. I am hoping it's not a long wait, this kind of storage will be great for those of us who make frequent backups of our home directories.

Re:$10 for 20GB+ R/W is cheaper than a thumb drive

[Eccles]

It's especially cheap compared to the value of that time. I've been trying to back up photos on DVDs, but with the amount of pics and movies I can take with a 2 GB card, it's a pretty time-consuming process. On the other hand, with 500 GB external drives for ~$140, that's less than $6 for 20 GB, so that's still a cheaper option at the moment.

Nice but still needs to come down

[MonGuSE]

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.

RE why not RW?

[jeffy210]

RE? Short for REwritable? Why in the world can't they just keep things uniform and stick with the RW designation. Does it really need a new acronym? What is the major different that would warrant that.

I'm not exactly jumping up and down

[uradu]

Until regular old read-only drives become cheap and plentiful--nay, let's just even say available for now--my enthusiasm is somewhat dampened.

Price

[Dan East]

"The average cost per disc will remain around $10 in retail outlets, despite production costs of around $5 per disc"

Of course, the higher the price of media, the less likely people will make backups of their HD movies. At $10 a crack, it's not too much more to buy another copy of the movie. I'm sure that benefit to copyright holders is factored into the cost of the media to some degree. The story makes mention of an accreditation process, which the studios undoubtedly have influence over (they had a say in developing the standard itself). Thus if the media isn't sold at the price the industry wants, the manufacturer could suddenly have problems maintaining their accreditation.

Dan East

Oh Great. Even less stable media.

[Petersko]

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.

RW?

[EnsilZah]

Does anyone actually use RW media?
I only occasionally see it in stores and have never seen actual discs used in the wild.

Compare that to dual-layer or lightscribe....

[phorm]

A few months ago, I wanted to buy lightscribe discs and they were still around $25 for a 10-pack, so about $2.50 per disc

Dual-layer discs were running about the same, sometimes more. So that would be about 4.3Gb or 8.6Gb'ish...
$1.72/GB for a lightscribe, or $3.44/GB on the dual-layer

Now compare that to single-layer HD-DVD discs with 25GB, that's about $2.50/disc again.

Not too bad, all things considered (and now the dual-layer or lightscribe stuff has gone down too).

I wonder how much a dual-layer HD-DVD or LightScribe HD-DVD disc will run? My personal hope is that the newer format discs push the price of existing DVD's (especially dual-layer or scribeable ones) down, since I'm sticking with standard DVD-players at the moment.