Sony on Tuesday announced plans to ship its DRX-710UL-T DVD burner in December. The Macintosh-compatible external double-layer DVD burner features FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 interfaces, and comes with Roxio’s Toast 6 Lite DVD burner software (Nero software is provided for Windows users). Double-layer DVD burning means that DRX-710UL-T users can burn up to 8.5GB of data — about 4 hours of MPEG-2 video — on a single DVD+R DL disc. It’s designed to be vertically mounted on a desktop.
The drive supports 2.4x DVD+R DL, 16X DVD+R, 8X DVD-R, 4X DVD+/-RW, 48X CD-R and 24X CD-RW recording speeds. While external optical disc burners are not supported by Apple’s iDVD application, other Apple software including iTunes, Mac OS X’s Disc Burner software and DVD Studio Pro work with such devices. The DRX-710UL-T will cost “about [US]$230,” according to Sony, and will be available through resellers nationwide, as well as from Sony’s Web site.