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DVD Burners – Where are We?

When DVD burners start to appear in PC World, you know they’ve hit the mainstream.

It was only two years ago that the first DVD burners aimed at end users started to appear. The prices were frightening at first but by the beginning of this year they had dropped down to around £450. In the last couple of months there has been a mini price war and now you can pick up the Pioneer A04 for under £200.

Standards, Standards

Buying a DVD burner is a confusing job. There are three standards but the choice really falls down to between two. Are you a plus or a minus?

First off the block was DVD-R (minus). This is the official standard and as such is allowed to carry the DVD logo on the drives. These drives generally write at 1X speed so it takes an hour to burn a full DVD. Having been spoilt with 40X CD-R burners that do a full CD-R in mere minutes, this seems poor but you have to bear in mind that a DVD-R hold 4.7Gb as opposed to the more conservative 700Mb of a CD-R. Panasonic’s DVD-R drives are usually combo drives that also write to DVD-RAM disks. More on those later.

DVD-R was barely in the shops when DVD+RW (plus)started to appear. DVD+RW is unofficial and as such, any hardware is not allowed to carry the DVD logo. These drives claimed far better compatibility with existing DVD drives and players and boast a 2.4X write speed. They use reusable media which compares well with the write once disks that DVD-R uses. On the face of it DVD+RW looks the winner.

However, it soon became apparent that contrary to expectation and marketing hype, DVD-R is actually more compatible at this stage. More DVD players can cope with the disks burned on these drives than the new ‘improved’ DVD+RW ones. A wrinkle is that compatibility with DVD-R seems to be very much a product of the blank disks used. The Internet is awash with newsgroups and bulletin boards where people discuss which blanks work best for them and their particular combination of playback devices.

To confuse things further, DVD-R has now gained the ability to use reusable media in the form of DVD-RW and Pioneer burners can now manage 2X speeds with certified media. To counter this, DVD+RW has naturally sprouted DVD+R. The ‘plus’ camp still has the edge on speed for now but 3X DVD-R/-RW drives are about to appear with 4X certified media also being mentioned so clearly speeds are improving rapidly.

It’s probably worth mentioning at this stage that all DVD burners can also write standard CD-R/CD-RW disks although the burn speeds are not as good as a dedicated CD burner.

Video or Data?

When choosing your standard, some people cite the intended usage as a good guide for which camp to go with. The Panasonic DVD-R drives also write DVD-RAM disks. These are designed primarily for data and as such, DVD-RAM makes a much better backup medium than either of the other standards. It has better error checking and also supports higher capacities with 9.4Gb blanks.

That said, you can still use any type of DVD burner for backing up data but overall reliability is slightly poorer. Packet writing also works better with DVD-RAM.

For people who want to create their own movies on DVD, the best bet is currently DVD-R and some experimentation with different brands of media to see what suits your own players. Luckily DVD-R media is much cheaper than DVD+R so experimentation won’t break the bank. Whilst you are unlikely to get a ‘plus’ blank for less than £4 or so, you can pickup DVD-R blanks for as little as 55p each with 2X media coming in at around £1 each. Prices are still falling for all types though and it may well be that 12 months from now, the price difference is negligible.

If you just want ultimate burning speed, then you have no choice at this stage – DVD+RW with its 2.4X is king of the hill.

The Future

The manufacturers seem have realised they have got themselves in to a bit of a pickle with the different standards so have been working on a solution. The first samples of a combination chipset have started to appear. These allow for combo drives that can work with either DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW formats. It is expected that drives using these will start to appear before the end of this year. Sony may be one of the first as they are supposedly in the plus camp but have released some laptops with DVD-R burners in them. Sneaky. The burn speeds are also going to rise with 3X almost here and 4X not far away.

Refreshingly, the media manufacturers are also being very co-operative. When one particular variety of media was updated to use a new dye in the recording layer, supposedly to improve compatibility with normal DVD players, existing customers were up in arms. Whilst overall compatibility was better, the new disks didn’t work on some drives that the older ones worked with. Very quickly the manufacturer responded by re-releasing the old version too under a ‘classic’ banner.

Conclusion

The world of DVD burners is in a state of rapid change. You may be well advised to sit on the fence for a bit until the dual format drives appear. In the meanwhile, if your money is burning a hole in your wallet, the cheapest format is DVD-R, the fastest DVD+RW. Take your pick!