Taiwan's 16x DVD writer price drops have recently caused a domino effect on pricing ranging from DVD-writers down to the CD-ROM. Hewlett-Packard (HP) reduced its 16x DVD writer with 4x DL to US$63 (NT$2,000), causing Lite-On to drop its prices. Then Pioneer, Austek and many other brands dropped followed suit with a ~US$10 reduction to between US$72 to $78. It appears that vendors are doing this in preparation to promote 16x DVD writers with 8x DL support.
The domino effect went on to combo drives, CD-RW writers and CD-ROM drives bringing these down 5% to 7% with new record low prices of US$25 for CD-RW writers and US$9.40 for CD-ROM drives. Currently Taiwan's market share for DVD-ROM/writer sales is 40%, Combo drives is 35% and CD-RW/ROM's is 25%. The market share for DVD-ROM/writer sales is expected to exceed 50% between May and June.
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Pioneer, Asustek and other brands have also lowered the retail prices for their 16x DVD Dual DL burners with 6x DL from NT$2,600-2,800 (US$82-88) to NT$2,300-2,500 (US$72-78), the sources indicated. The price cuts were a sign that vendors are looking to clear out inventory before promotions for 16x DVD Dual DL burner models with 8x DL begin, the sources added. |
It is quite amazing how much both DVD±RW and CD-RW drive's pricing both fell over the past few years, with DVD-RW drive pricing on par with what CD-RW drives use to cost just two to three years back. Performance for DVD writers is almost at their maximum apart from most LightScribe models which are still limited to 2.4x for DL writing and 8x DVD-R writing.
Source: DigiTimes
