Optical Storage 2004

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DVD Burners
When customers just need DVD writing capability on a tight budget, AOpen’s DRW4410 fills the bill without compromising on performance. While this unit is only +RW compatible, we’re less worried about this now than in months past. The drive’s performance is right in line with other mainstream units, and its low street price skirts the edge of the $100 mark, a number that should help resellers target price sensitive shoppers.

AOpen's DRW4410 DVD+RW

The interesting things about MSI’s DR4-A are not its benchmark scores. Rather MSI offers a persuasive deal to system builders by delivering a dual-format 4X DVD burner for under $150 that is also able to perform HD-BURN writing. HD-BURN is another brainstorm from Sanyo that enables a doubling of capacity in CD-R media, up to 1.4GB from 700MB. With HD-BURN, pit sizes are smaller and fewer bits are needed for error correction thanks to an updating of the firmware to the RSPC (Reed-Solomon Product Code) error-correction system instead of the conventional CIRC (Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code). The catch is that HD-BURNed CD-Rs must be played in a compliant DVD drive. For users who want to create VCD or SVCD videos for PC-based playback, this represents a major value-add that shouldn’t be ignored.
Pioneer’s DVR-SK12D is the drive you want to sell to all of your mobile clients. This is one of the first “slim” external DVD burners on the market. With a relatively small AC transformer brick, royal blue top panel, 1.08-pound weight, and a size not much larger than a paperback book, Pioneer is also smart enough to equip the multi-format drive with both USB 2.0 and FireWire ports. We’re not quite ready to give Pioneer an open-armed embrace, though, as we did encounter some Plug-and-Play drive recognition problems (that were eventually solved) and that odd DVD+R write failure seen in our test chart. Still, it didn’t seem to be anything that a firmware update wouldn’t resolve, and the portability and performance of the drive in general is worth presenting to your road warriors.

The standout in our group was Plextor. After sitting on the DVD sidelines for far longer than anyone expected, the high-end drive company finally jumped into DVD burning with a vengeance. The company’s latest drive, the PX-708, spent 21 months in research and development. Plextor’s Howard Wing, vice president, sales and marketing, notes that the problem facing the DVD market in its move to 8X is the old chicken and egg scenario: “The drive manufacturers can’t make 8X drives without compatible media, and the media manufacturers can’t make 8X discs without compatible drives.”

Plextor's PX-708A DVD+/-RW

Plextor worked with the media companies to improve their 4X media products to the point that the PX-708 could write approved DVD+R media at 8X. In turn, this now provides a platform on which the media companies can make mainstream 8X discs. In the interim, though, Plextor has a near-exclusive claim on 8X DVD burning—as do resellers of the PX-708 drives. (We found just before press time that MSI had joined the 8X league with its new DR8-A.)

Little Opportunities
Turning a profit in optical storage hardware isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but by paying attention to the technological innovations being offered by reputable vendors, you should be able eke out hundreds if not thousands of extra dollars in your system and upgrade sales by targeting the right value-add features at the right buyers. Sometime during 2004, manufacturers expect that DVD burners will reach 16X speeds in mass production, which poses a problem since 16X is the physical limit on how fast DVD recording can go. The next major leap in optical storage will come from blue laser technologies, which aren’t expected to hit stores until 2006. So heading forward, it will be the small differences between models and formats that make the difference in what sells and what doesn’t. If you can tell truly valuable features from the fluff and educate your customers about these, you’ll be the one with the purchase order at the day’s end.

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