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Technology news and Jobs arrow Fuzzy Logic arrow Toshiba unveils slim HD DVD-RW for notebooks
Toshiba unveils slim HD DVD-RW for notebooks E-mail
by Alex Zaharov-Reutt   
Tuesday, 05 June 2007
Toshiba releases a slim new HD DVD-RW drive for notebooks at Taiwan’s Computex as they fight with Sony’s Blu-ray to become the dominant movie and data standard.

Your next notebook might not come with a Blu-ray or HD DVD burner, instead having a regular DVD-RW drive instead, but it’s likely that Blu-ray and HD DVD burners will not only soon be an option, but a standard feature for road warriors.

That’s because Toshiba’s new slim HD DVD-RW drive, the SD-L912A, is able to read and record HD DVD disks, DVDs and CDs, and is naturally squarely aimed at the mobility market, giving consumers the ability to store 30Gb of data on dual layer HD DVD discs, or transfer their high-definition recordings from TV or HD camcorders to a blank HD DVD disc with enough space to store it.

Of course, Blu-ray gives consumers 50Gb of space to play with on a dual-layer disc, but Toshiba’s lower expected price will Toshiba hoping this will sway both consumers and manufacturers into adopting their disc standard.

Notebooks with Toshiba’s HD DVD burners likely won’t appear until at least the third quarter, with the fourth quarter more likely, as “sample” shipments are only due to begin arriving in July.

If you’re going to be visiting Computex in Taiwan, held in the capital Taipei from June 5 to 9, you can see the drive in question at Toshiba’s stand, #B1234.

No pricing for the drive was released, nor which customers have already expressed an interest, but as the format war grinds on, so do new drive models that are faster, slimmer, quieter and better than before.

Maybe the whole format war ends up really being a good thing, creating such frenzied competition over a plastic disc that prices end up plummeting far faster than they ever did for DVD players. If so, it would be ironic, given Sony and Toshiba’s desires to charge a high price to bring back some margin, margin which, with Sony’s latest Blu-ray price cut, is rapidly shrinking for consumers at last.
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