Source: CDRW-Central
After stating that the consumer market is now ready for rewritable DVD devices, Philips, Hewlett-Packard and Ricoh will start shipping DVD+RW Recordable drives for PC's and home recorders by the summer of 2001 ! |
The three vendors, in conjunction with fellow DVD+RW supporters Sony and Yamaha, also demonstrated a working DVD+RW PC drive and home recorder for the first time in the United States. The demo had video burned by a Ricoh DVD+RW drive and a Philips home recorder and then played back on both devices. To show the technology's backward compatibility the discs were then played in a commercially available DVD movie player, and then swapped back and forth with the PC disc being played by the home recorder and vice versa.
None of the companies would release pricing on their proposed products. Philips general manager for optical storage, said the Philips drive will come in priced below $1,000, but would give no further details. Philips program manager for A/V disc recording, would only say the home recorder would be 'competitively priced.' Ricoh, which will also manufacture blank media, gave the same answer. Panasonic is selling a DVD-RAM home recorder for $3,999. DVD-RAM is competing with DVD+RW to become the standard for rewritable DVD.
Vice president and general manager of HP's Colorado Personal Storage Solutions, said, 'pricing has not been worked out, but it will come in at a range that will allow for pervasive adoption.'
To make its first PC drive even more acceptable to consumers, HP has added CD-RW capability to the drive. Consumer research found that end users did not want to lose the ability to burn CD's for use in their other audio products.
