X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 16)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

A number of manufacturers are also improving their 4x model series, complementing them with new multi-format devices. The numerous announcements were mostly concerned with external optical drives with the USB 2.0 interface. It seems like the normal high-speed bus to connect external peripherals has catalyzed this market segment.

As for the prices ruling here, the pressure is high due to rapid changes in the model lines and tough competition. So we can see an 8x drive costing below $300. That’s the money you paid for a 4x DVD-R model just a little ago and 2x model half a year ago.

There’s a characteristic example from Taiwan where contract prices for one-format 4x drives (i.e. DVD-RW or DVD+RW only) dropped from $220 to $88. Multi-format 4x models have now stabilized at $120-130, while the contract price for 8x drives came down from $160-180 to $140-150 in a single month. So we are waiting for a corresponding price adjustment for multi-format 4x re(writable) DVD drives.

As we’ve landed on Taiwan, let’s notice the local manufacturers being busy with thin DVD+RW drives. That’s another proof to the statement that the market of notebooks and barebone systems is getting more prominent in the whole computer market. The list of the new pretenders for a slice of this pie includes such names as BenQ, AOpen and Lite-On. The latter, for example, should reach the level of 200 thousand items monthly in thin drives (all kinds of them), which is twice more than in the first half of the year.

Getting back to the full-size devices, I guess that 8x DVD drives are up to their own price reductions as 12x models are looming in the horizon. And the latter half of 2004 is going to give us 16x multi-format rewritable DVD drives! At least, Philips has a working prototype already. That said, the engineers suspect the 16x speed to be very close to the limit of the write speed for DVD disks. Anyway, it’s not only Philips that pushes the progress on, as Fuji Photo Film reported November that they created a material for optical disks to make this 16x write speed a reality.

In parallel, another technology will be trying to get accepted by the market. It is concerned with increasing the capacity of a DVD+R disk by making two data layers per side instead of one. If this comes true, the capacity of a standard DVD+R disk will nearly double from today’s 4.7 to 8.5GB. There’s only one uncertainty – whether the current drives have powerful enough lasers to be able to handle those disks after a firmware renewal.

Well, 8.5GB is nothing compared to the single-side dual-layer blue-ray disks from Matsushita with a capacity of 50GB and 2x write speed (this “2x” means 9MB/s). On the other hand, this is merely a maneuver war, preparations before the final engagement, which is to take place in 2004-5 between the two competing standards of optical disks of the next generation: blue-ray and advanced optical disk system.

We can also live to see one more standard, HD-DVD (from “High Definition”), which implies DVD disks with 15GB per layer. High Definition means one such disk may store one high definition movie. The proponents of the blue ray technology opposed the new standard that might become a danger to blue ray. Notwithstanding the opposition, DVD Forum accepted the specification, 8 votes against 6. However, the formal acknowledgement is only the beginning, and the HD-DVD format should prove its usefulness yet.

You may think that CD disks and CD-drives are quite obsolete nowadays. That’s not quite so. November, there were a few announcements of combo-drives (CD-RW/DVD-ROM), external with the USB 2.0 interface as well as of a couple of simple external CD-RWs. Well, it’s hard to invent anything new to the internal CD-RW, while external devices may be perfected yet with respect to the dimensions.