• PC World
• » Storage
• » Optical Drives

Every so often, a product like Pioneer's DVR-A03 DVD-R/CD-RW burner comes along and makes a host of high-cost computing tasks suddenly affordable. DVD-R writers and their capacious 4.7GB DVD-R media used to be extremely expensive--$5000 or more for a writer and $40 for each disc.

Now, thanks to the $995 DVR-A03 and its $10 media, many more users can afford to create their own DVD home movies--which will play on their living-room DVD players--and burn DVD-R data discs that mimic DVD-ROMs, a blessing for those of us who work with space-hogging digital video or audio.

But archiving home movies and massive amounts of data and transferring video from your old VHS tapes aren't the only activities likely to drive the DVR-A03's popularity. The dirty little not-so-secret about DVD-R is that it can be used to violate copyright law and illegally record commercial DVD movies. The copy protection scheme that's used for DVD movies (CSS, or Content Scrambling System) was broken a long time ago. And despite legal action, programs for copying the contents of a DVD to a hard drive sans protection remain plentiful.

Multitasking

The DVR-A03 I tested looks like a typical IDE DVD-ROM drive. It's a combo unit, capable of handling both DVD and CD media. Pioneer rates the drive to write CD-R at 8X, CD-RW at 4X, and DVD-R at 2X. One caveat: Like many 4X CD-RW drives, the DVR-A03 will not write to 10X-rated CD-RW discs. The drive is rated to read CD-ROMs at 16X and to read DVD-ROMs at 4X.

In my informal tests, CD reads came in at 11.6X and DVD reads at 1.9X, acceptable for a drive with this rated speed. Write speeds were just about at 8X for CD-R and nearly 4X for CD-RW. The DVR-A03 may not be lightning-fast with older optical media, but its backward compatibility is a major benefit; I would want one even if it were a one-trick pony.

That's because writing DVD-R is such a compelling trick. The DVR-A03 takes just 28 minutes to burn a full DVD-R disc--the equivalent of writing seven CD-Rs in 4 minutes apiece, but without the hassle of disc swapping. Another upside to the DVR-A03: It can both read and write rewritable DVD-RW media, although according to the company DVD-RW discs will cost about twice as much as DVD-R discs.

Whether you want to store high-quality digital video or archive data, the DVR-A03 (or SuperDrive to Apple users) could change the face of computing--and possibly the entertainment industry. The DVR-A03 will be available in May; these drives also ship in some Compaq Presarios.

DVD Glossary

• DVD-RAM: Format developed by Panasonic, Toshiba, and Hitachi. Randomly rewritable, 4.7GB per side, incompatible with current DVD players and most DVD-ROM drives. Recorders and drives are available.
  
  
• DVD-RW: Rewritable format, 4.7GB per side, compatible with some current DVD players. Consumer recorders due out this summer in the United States.
  
  
• DVD+RW: A long-promised, 4.7GB-per-side rewritable format, said to be compatible with virtually all current DVD players and drives. HP, Philips, and others promise drives and recorders by fall.
  
  

SUMMARY

Pioneer's DVR-A03 DVD-R recorder List price: $995 800/444-6784 www.pioneerelectronics.com

• See more like this:
• Pioneer,
• drive,
• optical,
• CD-R,
• CD-RW,
• DVD,
• DVD-RAM,
• DVD-RW,
• DVD+RW