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NEC Solutions is taking an unusual step in today's modern age of CD and DVD burners: The company has begun marketing and shipping a DVD burner under its own brand.

NEC joins a crowded market, but the company believes there's room for one more player--especially given the super-low $100 price of its ND-3500A model.

The drive, which has been shipping for several months as part of OEM packages (and sold as a "bare" OEM drive online), can write at up to 16X for DVD-R and DVD+R; 4X for DVD-RW and DVD+RW; and 4X for DVD+R Double Layer.

Not New to Retail

As Glenn Brower, NEC's director of storage products, points out, it's not as if NEC has never marketed a drive before. "We've been making optical products for 15 years. We did retail kits 10 years ago, with CD-ROM drives," he says. "But we've been focusing on OEM since then."

So why is the company jumping into the fray now?

"We believe there's an opportunity to provide a great product kit--16X is the top write-once speed for DVD--with software," Brower says.

With this drive, he says, "we hope to spark volume and demand for the DVD category. The pricing has come down on these drives, but some vendors are still charging a bit too much. We've tried to price this in a way that, between the speed, the software, and the price, we'll have a triple benefit for consumers."

With certain 8X media, such as Verbatim discs, Brower says, the drive can write at 16X. "The reflectivity of the media has to be good enough to allow the drive to write at that speed," notes Brower.

The ability to write at fast speeds to slower media is handy given the low availability of 16X media at this time. Of competing 16X models, currently only Pioneer says its DVR-A08 can perform this hat trick.

Forging Ahead to Retail

In this first phase, NEC is marketing the drive through "tier one distributors, mail order, and catalog," says Brower. "In our second phase, it's possible we'll go into retail."

The drive's price (technically, it's $99.99) is $20 to $30 more than what the OEM version will cost you, according to PC World's Product Finder listing for the OEM drive. But that's still a bargain for consumers, for whom a drive with comparable software might cost more like $130 or $150 at retail. For the extra bucks, you get Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 3.5 Suite Deluxe and NovaStor Backup, as well as tech support through NEC for the drive (30 days through Ulead for the primary burning software).

More important, you also get the promise of firmware upgrades--which are critical given the ever-changing landscape of media. Firmware upgrades can broaden a drive's support for different media types.