Pioneer New Media Technologies said it would ship the world’s first combination DVD/CD recordable drive, the DVR-A03, by the end of May for US$995. Actually, the product, announced at this week’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, is the second such goodie if you count Apple’s SuperDrive — which is based on Pioneer technology.
The SuperDrive is only available in Apple’s high-end Power Mac 733 system. The DVR-A03 is a standalone device that’s targeted to digital video recording and data archiving applications. The drive reads and writes four recordable formats including DVD-R (write once For General), DVD-RW (re-recordable), CD-R and CD-RW, and offers up to 4.7GB of storage capacity per DVD side. In addition, the new drive is capable of recording DVD-R discs at twice-normal speed (2X) — an industry first, according to Paul Dempsey, president of Pioneer New Media Technologies.
Meanwhile, LaCie has announced today its first external DVD-R/CD-RW drive with FireWire connectivity. Priced at US$999, the combo drive lets you use a single drive to write and read DVD-R General discs as well as CD-R and CD-RW discs. LaCie will begin shipping the new drive in June.
The LaCie DVD-R/CD-RW drive records to 4.7GB DVD-R General Use discs at 2x (2.6 MB/sec) speed and provides 6x (7.8 MB/sec) read performance for DVD-R, DVD-Video and DVD ROM discs. Smaller files can be stored on lower-cost 650MB CD-Rs at 8x speed or on CD-RW discs at 4x speed. CD playback is at 24x.
By incorporating FireWire connectivity, the LaCie DVD-R/CD-RW drive can be quickly and easily connected to the FireWire ports on Mac G4 workstations, Cubes, PowerBooks, and iMacDV systems, LaCie said. The LaCie DVD-R/CD-RW drive will be available in June.
The external drives ship complete with a FireWire or SCSI-3 interface, and an international power supply, as well as three 80-min.CD-R discs. The LaCie Recording Utilities CD package is also included, which offers Adaptec Toast 4.1.2 for Macs.
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