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DVD Burners Hit Prime Time

Though the format wars continue, rewritable DVD finally has mass appeal. We test 13 drives, starting at $250.

Jon L. Jacobi

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Pioneer PIONEER DVD/CD RECORDABLE INT ATAPI (Pioneer-DVRA04)

LG Electronics GMA-4020B

Sony DRU-500A

Vivastar RS-111

Panasonic LF-D521

Ikebana DVD+RW

Cendyne DVD-R/RW External USB

Pacific Digital DVD Burner

Good-bye, CD-RW. Hello, rewritable DVD. The latest DVD burners are faster and can hold more data than your CD-RW drive. And as sure as someone getting whacked on The Sopranos, the prices of these drives will keep falling. For as little as $250, you can now own a rewritable DVD drive that will turn your movies, photos, and TV recordings into high-quality DVD video playable in most living-room DVD players.

But there are other good reasons--besides being able to burn movies--for you to plunk down your money on a new DVD burner. One of the most compelling is the ability to create reliable backups painlessly. A rewritable DVD drive lets you store gigabytes of data on a single disc, so backups will take only a handful of DVDs. Forget the swap-a-disc-every-5-minutes routine of CD-RW drives; the speed and convenience of rewritable DVD will transform your backup habits for the better.

If homemade DVD movies and easy backups aren't enough to sway you, how about the one-drive-writes-all factor? Most rewritable DVD drives also burn and read all types of CD media, though not as quickly as a late-model CD-RW drive can.

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