| Lite-On brings the 20x DVD burner to market. Does anyone care? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 14 November 2006 | |
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With the reported speed boost from 18x to 20x said to be “very small”, this looks more like one of those “pissing contests” where IT companies in greater Asia try to outdo each other, just as when one LCD or plasma TV manufacturer releases ‘the world’s biggest’ TV only to have their major competitor release one that’s 1-inch bigger a few weeks later. In the case of DVD burners, Lite-On’s major competitors include Sony, Toshiba, Benq-Philips and Hitachi-LG. So, how soon before one of Lite-On’s competitors announce a 22x speed burner then, eh? But let’s get back to Lite-On’s new model. When quoting burn speeds, it’s important to remember that the headline speed is not the speed you’ll get when burning all the different types of discs you can burn today. The 20x speed is for write-once DVD-R and DVD+R discs. Pop in a DVD/RW disc or a DVD-RAM disc, and the speed slows quite a bit. In DVD-RAM’s case, it’s down to 12x, although this is actually probably still a speed boost over older models. There are two models from Lite-On. The first is the LH-20A1P, while the second is the LH-20A1H which also supports the burning of LightScribe discs, which let you burn, in monochrome, a high-res image or text onto the ‘top’ of the disc where a label is normally applied or a felt-tip permanent market is used to write on the disc. They're cool, but the discs cost more than regular blanks, and by all accounts it has only been a quite modest market success. No pricing has been released as yet, but the drive will be offered to computer manufacturers who want to add the latest drive to their line-up. The non-LightScribe version of the drive goes into production in December, while the LightScribe version goes into production in Q1 2007, so if you want one of these drives, you’re going to have to wait. And the funniest thing about all of this is... who wants a new DVD burner anyway? Surely we all want a shiny new Blu-ray or HD DVD burner instead. The only reason why you want a DVD burner is because single layer discs are dirt cheap at less than 50c each. Blank dual layer DVDs are still quite expensive, with blank Blu-ray and HD DVD discs still ridiculously overpriced. One day, all of that will change, and the optical format will be completely dead, with ultra cheap flash memory with 100Gb of memory so cheap they’ll be given away in cereal boxes. But as that future scenario is still a ways off, so until then... get your DVDs and burn, baby... burn! {moscomment}
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