Sony DRU-500A Review 203
An anonymous reader writes "Just found a nice review of the Sony DRU-500A" This looks
to be damn solid DVD burner. It's amazing how much prices on these things have
come down. It might be time for me to make my epic film starring CowboyNeal, Samzenpus and Hemos in a moving story about Love, Friendship, and Growing Up in the Face of Adversity. I probably should write a script or something before I start filming. Or not.
Sony DRU-500A Review (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DVD-burners == zip drives (Score:5, Insightful)
DVD burner's will be used extensivly for the next few years when the will be replaced by something better. Just like CD's are now being replaced by DVD's
Figured as much (Score:2, Insightful)
wait for the external drive (Score:2, Insightful)
With an external drive, you don't have to buy a new one with every new machine, you can move it between machines, you can put it in a more convenient location than the main CPU, and when DVDs become obsolete (as they will sooner or later), you can keep the drive around for a few more years without keeping a whole, obsolete computer.
Sony == no go (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wait for the external drive (Score:2, Insightful)
you can move it between machines
I don't know about you, but when I can move an internal drive just as easily as an external drive. It's not that hard.
you can keep the drive around for a few more years without keeping a whole, obsolete computer.
Just move it to the new computer...
DVDs are convenient for full backups (Score:3, Insightful)
how often do you really need to burn like 8 cds for one project anyway?
How about monthly full backups of a large storage device? Daily incremental backups (everything changed since yesterday) and weekly differential backups (everything changed since the last full backup) only go so far. Eight CDs don't even total six gigabytes.
How about storage of digital video? It's big, and too-heavy compression will destroy its suitability for use in further editing.
Re:Burning times (Score:1, Insightful)
DVD at 1X is equivalent to CD at 9X
DVD at 2X is equivalent to CD at 18X
and so on.
Re:DVD-burners == zip drives (Score:2, Insightful)
DVDs were created to be obsolete, and within a few years, when Blu-Ray technologies are creating 30GB+ disks, a DVD burner will be one of those devices that will make someone say "You bought an expensive computer 4 years ago, and that device was overpriced crap", much like we view zip drives today.
Everything was created to be obsolete.
DVD-Burners will catch on, regardless of a new, better technology that may be around the corner.
How many people have CD-RW drives right now? A lot, even though there are DVD burners. DVD (re)writeable units just need to get faster (4x is WAAAAAAY slow, especially since there's more space on a DVD than a CD) and cheaper, and people will buy them like flapjacks.
It's the same principal with blu-ray devices. Sure it will be the superior audio/video/backup medium, but until prices drop to the point that your average consumer can afford it, people will continue using DVD burners.
Linux???? (Score:2, Insightful)
Atto
Re:DVD-burners == zip drives (Score:1, Insightful)
The reason I don't buy a drive (other than I don't have any money) is that I don't want to get locked into technology that's going to be more of a pain than it's worth. I dual boot Win95c and Redhat, and I've bought my last Microsoft operating system (coincidentally, I'm under the impression that Microsoft has written their last OS, they choose now to churn out Media Stations now). If I can't use something under Linux, it won't get purchased, period, and I don't have the money to take risks on technology that might and probably work under Linux, but doesn't now.
I can't understand why there are so many DVD technologies anyway. There are only so many physical formats to fool with, and everything else is software. Make a drive that has read and write lasers for DVDs, CD-R, CD-RWs, and CDs, and have everything else be done in software.
Re:DVD media (Score:3, Insightful)
See here [pioneeraus.com.au] and here [storagesupport.com]
Re:number 1? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the audience you're speaking to.
And I tell you, once you start downloading SVCDs and MP3s and games (God Bless USENET!), that hard drive space goes quickly. Sure, you could have 500 CD-Rs lying around--but that's inconvenient as hell. Better would be to have it on 60 DVDs, and even better would be to have it on hard drive arrays *backed up* to DVDs.
Not to mention home video recordings--what better way to store them long-term than on high-quality DVDs? Even DV tape is capable of degrading over time, especially with repeated viewings, because it's a tape-based format--whereas the optical DVD format is both more durable (esp. if you make multiple back-ups) and will definitely be long-lasting in terms of format readability since it has been adopted by the movie industry. I have wedding and birth film on DV just waiting for me to be able to afford a DVD-R/W recorder so I can transfer it to DVD and make copies to distribute to friends and family.
Let's face it--the time has come for the recordable DVD to go mainstream. Even set-top DVD recorders are available at Best Buy and Circuit City in the $800 range now, whereas they were $2000 and hard to find last year. In a couple more years they'll be replacing the VCR in most middle-income households, and only the low-income will still be using VCRs instead of DVDRs.
Re:number 1? (Score:3, Insightful)
> which means a fairly simple codec.
They all use MPEG-2 right now, because that's what a DVD is--an MPEG-2 encoded in a special format. I think some standalone DVD recorders can do MPEG-1, but I don't think anyone cares--that isn't standard and won't play back on most normal DVD players.
> This means no DIVX or XVID
There are already commercial MPEG-4 encoding chips available. They're trivial since everything is done in hardware--it's very simple to make an ASIC or similar that can do something with no effort than would strain a general-purpose CPU. They're just too expensive right now for consumer-level applications--exactly like items with hardware MPEG-2 encoders were a couple of years back.
> standard T120 VCR tapes can record a full 6 hours and they're
> dirt cheap and reusable.
The reason they're called T-120 tapes is because they last 120 minutes at the best quality; as you know they only last 6 hours if you use a mode like SLP/EP and don't mind having a *very* poor picture with black lines here and there every few frames. Only very cheap or very poor people, or people with bad eyesight, or people who intend to just time-shift and not keep the recorded program, use longer-play modes. I can't even do that for time-shifting programs, the picture's so bad.
Aside from which, that's what DVD-RW is for. Reusable. Perfect for time-shifting, while DVD-R is perfect for archiving. And you may not fit 6 hours of low-quality craptastic video on one without invovking a nonstandard (for DVD) MPEG-1 stream, but so what--just buy three, since they'll be cheaper than even the cheapest VHS tapes within the next 2 years. DVD-R and DVD-RW discs are destined to follow the same path CD-R and CD-RW discs did when they were a relative novelty in the consumer space--they started out expensive, they're getting cheaper, and in a few years they'll be available for pennies each. Today you can find excellent-quality Taiyo Yuden-made CD-Rs on sale at Best Buy for $5 per 50 after a main-in rebate, or $20 before the rebate--that is where DVD-Rs will be in five years.