DVD market growing, despite confusion over formats
by Alan Zisman (c) 2002
First published in Business in
Vancouver,
Issue #641 February 5- 11, 2002, The High Tech Office column
CD-recordable (also known as "burners") and DVD drives
are increasingly
commonplace options for computers, while last year, home DVD players
outsold
VCRs for the first time. Not surprisingly, there's been increased
interest
in burning DVD discs, which have a capacity of 4.7 gigabytes and are
able
to store as much as six or seven CD discs. This is large enough to back
up today's multi-gigabyte hard drives.
As well, with digital camcorders and Firewire-equipped
computers making
desktop video editing increasingly practical, recordable-DVD is an
attractive
way to distribute these new-age home movies. (Don't count on copying
Hollywood
movies, however.)
But a few obstacles remain before recordable-DVD
becomes a mass-market
phenomenon. Drive prices have just dipped south of $1,000, a
price-point
where many users start to look but only a few actually buy.
As well, there's a battle of dueling acronyms. Trying
to make sense
of the plethora of DVD standards is like watching a Sesame Street
episode in which everything is brought to you by the letter 'D.' For
instance:
DVD-RAM represented the first-generation of recordable
DVD drives. Discs
burned on these drives often cannot be played on home DVD players.
Because
of this, the battle is shaking down to two other similar looking but
incompatible
acronyms.
DVD-RW (also referred to as DVD-R/RW) drives started
showing up last
year, with models sold as an option in computers from Apple, Compaq,
and Sony. (All three secretly offered the same
hardware: Pioneer's
DVR-103 drive.) DVD-RW drives can read both CD and DVD discs, and can
write
recordable (write-once) and rewritable CD and DVD discs. (Thus, Apple
calls
its offering the "SuperDrive.") The big advantage of these drives is
compatibility.
DVD discs written in them can be read in most (though not all) recent
home
DVD players and computer DVD-ROM drives.
DVD+RW drives are more recent, from Hewlett-Packard,
Phillips,
and others. DVD+RW drives can write to CD-R and CD-RW discs, as well as
to rewritable DVD discs (about $20), but not to the cheaper (about $10)
DVD-R discs.
DVD discs made on these DVD+ RW drives can be read on
an estimated 67
to 70 per cent of the installed base of home DVD players and computer
DVD-ROM
drives, making them less widely compatible than discs recorded using
DVD-RW
drives. However, users of DVD+RW drives can record discs by simply
dragging
files to the drive icon, treating these discs like a (very big) floppy
drive.
I recently had loan of an HP DVD-Writer DVD100i drive
($899). It was
easy to install into my PC, with the help of a video tutorial on the
accompanying
CD. HP's software starts up automatically when a blank CD or DVD disc
is
inserted into the drive. Similar to the software used with most CD
burners,
HP's software gives users options to use the blank disc in different
sorts
of ways: format it like a big floppy disk, back up a hard drive, create
data or music discs, or create a video DVD disc.
In the later case, users can create a fancy video disc
menu, though
these menus are static, lacking the full-motion Hollywood glitz of
Apple's
iDVD 2 software. The drive is fast, quicker than Pioneer's popular
DVD-RW
model: 8x DVD reading, 2.4x DVD writing, along with 32x CD reading and
12x CD-R writing. It took about an hour to burn 4.7 gigabytes of MP3
music
files onto a disc.
Despite the high cost and confusion over multiple
formats, the market
for recordable DVD drives is growing. Apple's Mike Evangelist
says:
"The adoption of this stuff is going to exactly parallel CDs and CD
recording,
but accelerated about three or four times. I think it's going to be a
relatively
short time before this technology is on every computer."