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LAS VEGAS -- Maxell is showing at Comdex here a host of new DVD and CD media, and promising such advances as smaller and double-sided DVD-R discs, plus discs suited to today's faster drives. But don't hold your breath--most of the promises won't be fulfilled this year.

Spinning Faster

Maxell hopes to ship its new 4X DVD-R and 2X DVD-RW media in February. The 4X discs will support a transfer rate of about 5.5 megabytes per second, and the 2X discs, about 2.8 MBps--provided they're used with the corresponding drives for their speeds. As with CD-R and CD-RW, faster DVD-RW/-R drives won't operate at their optimum speed unless they sense that the discs inside them are up to it.

But the new media will have some compatibility problems. For example, it's likely that DVD-ROM drives and DVD players manufactured before this fall won't be able to read 4X DVD-Rs, acknowledges Rich Gadomski, Maxell representative.

Worse yet, writing to these discs may damage some older DVD-RW/-R drives, drive manufacturers have acknowledged. If you own an older drive, you should check with your drive manufacturer about a firmware upgrade (usually a free Internet download) to fix the problem. Pioneer Electronics, for example, warned customers about the possibility in October and urged firmware upgrades.

"You're not supposed to use 4X media in a 2X drive without getting a firmware upgrade to the drive," Gadomski says.

In March 2003, Maxell expects to ship 48X CD-R media to take advantage of what are not quite the fastest CD-R drives currently available. Why isn't the company supporting the even faster 52X drives? Along with Sony, Yamaha, and Plextor, Maxell has decided that spinning a disc fast enough for 52X recording is dangerous, producing a level of stress that can damage the disc.

Double-Sided Dilemmas

Come February, Maxell will release 3-inch, 2X Mini DVD-R discs that will let you easily carry 1.4GB in a shirt pocket. You should be able to write on these with any DVD-RW/-R drives, and read them with any DVD-ROM drive or living room DVD player that can read standard-size DVD-Rs.

But Maxell, which already sells 3-inch camcorder DVD and CD-R Mini discs, isn't thinking primarily about your shirt pocket. These discs are planned for the next generation of digital camcorders, digital cameras, and MP3 players.

Unlike the other new media announced, Maxell's new double-sided DVD-R discs are available now. These are the do-it-yourself equivalent of those commercial DVDs with the wide-screen version of a movie on one side and full-screen version on the other. The discs can hold an impressive 9.4GB but have a small inconvenience: You must flip the disc over to use all of it--which is not much easier than putting in a new disc.

Maxell representatives say the company expects the double-sided DVD-Rs will be used primarily in digital jukeboxes and commercial applications. Most users will have little use for them, especially since the discs cannot be easily labeled and are expected to cost more than two single-sided DVD-Rs.

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