COMMENTARY--Amidst a rush of DVD burners, each one more surprising than the last, ZDNet Australia's reviews editor wonders why they're so popular all of a sudden.It's been a busy week here at ZDNet Reviews. We've had a sudden rush of DVD burner releases, and from reader feedback and statistics, it appears that this is one product area that everyone's keen to see more coverage on.
Iomega's Super DVD Writer kicked things off for us, providing as it does yet another low-priced entry into the multi-format DVD burning category; we can expect to see price tumbles in everyone else's product lines any day now -- and that's got to be good at the purchasing end of the equation, whether you're buying drives for serious data backup or fun consumer purposes.
HP's entry this week was the HP DVD Movie Writer dc3000. In the past HP has provided solid but essentially unexciting drives, but the DVD Movie Writer certainly taps into the consumer frenzy surrounding home recording, both legal, and, shall we say, slightly less legitimate. It sits in an unusual place between a fully-fledged DVD Recorder and a DVD burning drive; it'll be interesting to see whether consumers bite on this somewhat half-and-half concept.
Plextor, not to be outdone, also upped the ante this week with the PX-708A, a drive capable of a whopping 8x write rate to DVD+R media. Sure, you'll pay slightly more for DVD+R media over its cheaper -R cousin, but the amount of time you'll save could well make the extra cost worth it. If it too can drive adoption of the +R format, we could see some really competitive pricing between the two formats as well -- although I'm not holding my breath.
All this makes me wonder two things -- why are DVD drives so popular, and what does the future hold for this particular format?
The cynic in me says that the simple answer to question one is piracy; while a copied DVD movie is by its nature a compressed copy, that doesn't seem to stop a whole horde of people offering slightly-suspect 'backups' at flea markets and on ebay. I've got sympathy for the argument that you should be able to back up your own DVDs for personal use and protection, although the law probably doesn't follow me on that one -- and bear in mind that everything I know about the law I learned from old episodes of Murder She Wrote, so please don't quote me if you end up looking down the wrong end of a judge's gavel.
Then there's the data question. If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be rapidly filling an 80GB hard drive, I'd have looked at you quite oddly. If my main hard drive crashes, though, an awful lot of photos, digital media and writing work would go up in smoke, and it's something that I should really get around to backing up. In common with roughly 99.997% of the population, though, I'll back up "when I get a free moment". DVDs have a number of backup advantages, not the least of which is the ubiquitous nature of DVD-ROM drives to read the data back on. That ubiquity does present security problems for some data, but that's nothing that a hefty safe and underfed Alsatian can't overcome.
I suspect that average consumers also finally understand DVDs, although that's something that's been a long while coming, and had they not been primed with CDs, it'd still be a very niche market in the way that Laserdisc was. It still doesn't stop regular users from misunderstanding the format differences, although there are very few new drives that don't support everything, and pretty much every new player (excluding games consoles) supports everything but DVD-RAM anyway.
As for the future? Sony offered us a glimpse at that this week with the Japanese unveiling of its PSX console/home media centre. At its core it's a games system based around the Playstation 2 hardware, but it also boasts a jaw-dropping 24x DVD burner. Presuming that nobody at Sony is fiddling with the numbers and specifications, that's roughly 266Mbps. To put that into context, if it supported those rates for regular CD-R media (which it almost certainly won't), it'd take longer to put a CD-R into the drive tray than it would to burn an entire disc -- roughly three seconds. Wait three minutes and you could fill an entire writeable DVD disc. I can't imagine that this is technology that Sony will retain exclusively for its console arm, and I also can't imagine that a small mass of dodgy movie pirates aren't busy salivating and just waiting for a standard IDE drive version.
What do you think? Are DVD burners just today's trendy technology? Are they all only appealing for piracy? What do you use DVD burners for? Let me know at edit@zdnet.com.au
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