DVD Drives: DVD Recording Update

Our first look at Pioneer's DVR-A03 DVD-R drive a couple of months back was love at first sight. This all-purpose drive writes roomy 4.7GB DVD-R discs at 2X, CD-R discs at 8X, and CD-RWs at 4X; and it reads almost all optical media types, including DVD-ROM at 4X. (With CD technology, 1X is equal to 150 KBps; with DVD, 1X is equal to 1.38 MBps.) Pioneer wasn't hyping it at the time, but its drive also writes DVD-RW at 1X; the company's reticence was due to the lack of version 1.1 DVD-RW media.

Version 1.0 media--sold only in Japan--had an encryption code block that made bit-by-bit copying of commercial DVDs impossible. And with the block, only the DVD-RW video recorders that 1.0 media was meant for could initialize the discs. The new 1.1 media takes care of that issue, but unfortunately most existing DVD drives and players misinterpret 1.1 DVD-RW media as dual-layer DVD, so compatibility is still very limited. Pioneer claims that a firmware upgrade of most DVD drives and players will let them read 1.1 media. That may work for your PC's DVD-ROM drive, but it will be far more difficult, if not impossible, for your living-room DVD player.

We used the DVR-A03 to test 1.1 media, writing 4.2GB of data to a disc, erasing the disc, and repeating the process several times. Each write pass took just over 53 minutes--spot on for 1X writing--without an error. We also burned a DVD movie and finalized the disc as required to test compatibility with home DVD players. Our test discs worked fine in the DVR-A03; unlike DVD-R, however, they were unreadable in other DVD-ROM drives, a Panasonic DR-E10 recorder, and a Toshiba DVD player.

Price may also be an issue. Although the $800 DVR-A03 is inexpensive compared with the $5000 that DVD-R drives previously cost, it's hardly an impulse buy. There is now a cheaper, albeit less versatile option: Panasonic's $549 LF-D311N DVDBurner drive, a second-generation, 4.7GB-per-side DVD-RAM drive that can also write DVD-R. But it writes DVD-R at only 1X, taking 60 minutes to write a full disc versus the DVR-A03's 30 minutes. And it can't write DVD-RW, CD-R, and CD-RW, as the Pioneer drive can. Still, the LF-D311N passed our DVD-R data and movie burn tests with flying colors; it offers DVD-RAM's promise of 100,000-times rewrite capability; and it saves you more than $200.

Confused yet? Well, there's more: Drives using yet another rewritable DVD standard, DVD+RW, will be on the market this fall. We'll have more to say about those products in coming months.

SUMMARY

DVR-AO3 DVD-R drive Street: $800 Pioneer www.pioneerelectronics.com

SUMMARY

LF-D311N DVDBurner DVD-RAM/DVD-R drive Street: $549 Panasonic www.panasonic.com