Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday two new DVD+RW drives that aim to address one of the major criticisms of the DVD rewritable and recordable formats: compatibility:
The significance of HP's announcement on Monday is that its two new DVD+RW drives--the dvd200i and dvd200e--will support DVD+R, which has a higher degree of compatibility with DVD-ROM drives than DVD+RW. This is intended to let buyers of the new HP drives record video, digital images and audio onto discs and have them play on more DVD-ROM drives and players than they would have without DVD+R support.
While HP is attempting to address the issue of compatibility for its DVD+RW drives by supporting the DVD+R format, just how many DVD-ROM drives they will be compatible with is not clear.
"Compatibility is definitely the most crucial issue that DVD+RW supporters face, and HP's announcement is a good sign of improvement," Gartner analyst Mary Craig said. "But it's not clear by how much."
HP has developed a utility for DVD+RW drives that will let consumers change a disc setting to increase its compatibility with DVD-ROM drives, Sanderson said. The utility will be included with dvd200i and dvd200e drives. Users of HP's first internal DVD+RW drive, the dvd100i, will be able to download the utility from the company's Web site.
As long as the companies keep struggling over a standard for the DVD-R(W) format this will be one solution although it would be so much easier to come up with just one standard...
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Source: ZDNet
