Your DVD Burner is Obsolete
by Kristopher Kubicki on June 10, 2004 8:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Media and Direction
With all this hype about 16X and 12X burn speeds, where are consumers expected to get the newest media? At this time of publication, we still only have two manufacturers who can reliably produce dual layer media, and only a handful that can reliably produce 8X/12X certified media. During the show, we had a chance to talk to some of Taiwan's larger media manufacturers, including Ritek, Prodisc and CMC Magnetics.Much to our surprise, all three manufacturers had 16X DVD+R media on display. There seems to be enough expectation that 16X DVD-R media will also follow, although we did not see samples of that particular disc on the show floor. As we saw with the AOpen and BenQ drives, chipset companies like MediaTek and Ricoh are confident enough of 16X DVD-R media support to advertise it in their upcoming chipset specifications. Sanyo and Philips are expected to follow suit. However, as common as 16X media was, dual layer media seemed almost untalked about.
Some manufacturers seemed extremely receptive of BluRay (BD). From all manufacturers to whom we spoke, most seemed to agree that we will see top BluRay devices before 2006. 18 months does not seem very far for a future format that has virtually nothing to show for at this time. Quanta hinted at even earlier devices on their roadmap. BD uses 450nm lasers while DVD uses 650nm.
Click to enlarge.
ProDisc, on the other hand, had a significant amount of material contradicting the advancement of BluRay in favor of HD-DVD. Whether or not some of ProDisc's claims are valid has yet to be decided, but below is a snapshot of how the Taiwanese manufacturer sees the cards fall with regards to future optical formats.
Click to enlarge.
Although difficult to see, ProDisc had a small display that almost seemed in favor of Near-Field magnification (which is a key component of BD technology). Below, you can see some teasers of 50nm radius pits. The theoretical capacity on such discs is 100GB.
Click to enlarge.
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quanta - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
CD or not, I hope cartridge requirements take off. Thanks to the stupid cost cutting manufacturers, the average CDs not only waste half of recordable surface, but makes the product less reliable. Worse yet, it isn't required for DVD, making handling of dual side DVD a hassle, and thus unpopular. Such cost cutting measures should have been banned 20 years ago when first CD is made.sisq0kidd - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
tfranzese, oriental is what you call a rug, not people... if you're gonna bash someone, do it with the correct information...tfranzese - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
#14, are you blind? I don't think Kris is oriental.ViRGE - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
Truth be told, #12, I really hope BluRay takes off because of the cartridges. While I'll agree they're more of a hassle, as we've seen before, DVDs are rather delicate, even compared to CD's. While they still hold up relatively well, there are a lot of scratched discs out there that aren't 100% usable, and that's a problem. While more error correction could also reduce(but not really solve) the problem, more ECC bits means less space for actual data, so a cartridge is ideal from that perspective. With discs approaching 25GB, a scratch that can wipe out a couple of gigabytes is rather on the dangerous side, I believe.bbomb - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
At least in a cartridge it probably has a longer life than DVD's because just a micor scratch on a DVD can reder it useless. I would think being in a cartridge would eliminate that chance greatly.Pollock - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
May I ask why screenshots were taken with a camera, and not by hitting Print Screen?Brickster - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
Kristopher!Loved the article, especially the title! You should be a writer ;)
-brick
tappertrainman - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
I really hope Blu-Ray doesn't make it. I hate cartridges, and it just sounds bad. At least with HD you know people will still be able to use regular DVD's and probably CD's still. Blu-Ray throws all of that out, for miniscule gains.KristopherKubicki - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
7: MSI has an unbridged SATA burner; unfortunately it only works with the ICH5/ICH6 southbridge SATA (for now). :'(Kristopher
AlexWade - Friday, June 11, 2004 - link
Shouldn't the title of the article be "Everything you've ever owned is obselete". Or better yet "Even though you just bought it, it is obselete".