TORONTO – Hewlett Packard has up the ante in the DVD arena with the launch of a new writeable DVD drive, called the HP DVD-writer dvd100i. It can create and rewrite DVD disks as well as CDs.
The company is hoping consumer interest in editing and storing home video on removable media will stimulate sales. The new drive will generate interest among computer users that need a high-capacity backup system for large computer hard drives.
The new drive, which starts shipping in September, will be sold at suggested retail price of $899 Cdn / $599 US, while blank DVD+RW disks will cost $25 Cdn / $15.99 US each.
It uses a new removable storage standard called DVD+RW, which will read and write DVD data, used for high-quality movie disks. It will also read, write and rewrite CD-R and CD-RW disks. Off-the-shelf software and music CDs and DVDs can also be read by the drive.
After formatting a blank DVD disk, which takes about an hour, the drive can store up to 4.7 GB of data in about 45 minutes, according to an HP spokesperson. A disk can also be quick-formatted in 10 minutes. It can also write up to 700 MB of data on CD-R and CD-RW disks.
The drive is compatible with systems that run Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 Professional and the forthcoming Windows XP. Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT 4.0 Server are not supported.
The internal drive can be installed through a traditional drive bay to an IDE/ATAPI connection, which is the standard internal drive connector on most of today’s consumer computers.
HP said that external drives will be available next spring that will connect to USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 ports, which can import and export data to and from an external computer peripheral at high speeds.
There are several competing standards including DVD-R (recordable, mainly for movies), DVD-RAM (record and rewrite, used mainly for data storage) and DVD-RW (record and rewrite, for both movies and data).
Pioneer New Media Technologies shipped the first combination DVD/CD recordable drive, the DVR-A03, at the end of May. It uses the competing DVD-RW standard.
The problem with the various formats is that often they are not compatible with each other. Compatibility can also be hit and miss with DVD players used with home entertainment systems.
The other issue that may thwart adoption of the DVD writeable drives is that unlike music CDs, DVD movies cannot be duplicated thanks to copy-protection mechanisms built into off-the-shelf DVD movies.
HP is in a strong position with the DVD+RW standard because it leads the market in CD-RW drive sales and has the support of partners such as Dell Computer, Sony, Philips Electronics, Mitsubishi Chemical, Ricoh, Thomson Multimedia and Yamaha.
