My sense is that DVD-RW is a transitional phase and the market won't really take off in time for it to pre-empt the assault by DVD-RAM and DVD+RW. Having said that, we're already seeing some electronics manufacturers other than Sony, like Compaq and Apple, bring DVD-RW to market. My advice: Unless you have money to burn, don't buy until things settle down.
That settling will determine how the three formats play with one another and whether any of the three will achieve the dominance VHS has in home video. As the videotape battle wasn't decided on quality--Beta was clearly the superior format--I expect marketing muscle and the ability to drive down prices to play key roles here as well.
Panasonic will be here at PC Expo (the show actually opens tomorrow) showing DVD-RAM, which is also supported by Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi, and others. A DVD-RAM drive works very much like a typical hard disk drive, allowing random access to all the data on the disk. Panasonic will be showing its shipping and soon-to-ship products.
DVD+RW, whose main backers are Philips and Hewlett-Packard, will also be here. This format is a bit of an enigma to me, lacking as it does the official endorsement of the DVD Forum, an important standard-setting group. I will investigate DVD+RW and will provide a better comparison of the three formats later this week.
But again, technical issues may not really play into this at all. The major consumer electronic players and their personal computing divisions and friends smell big money here. DVD-RAM and DVD+RW seem to be technical kissing cousins, but consumers could still suffer by choosing the wrong format early.
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