Curious About DVD Writers

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britre
Posts: 94
Joined: Sun Apr 06, 2003 9:54 am

Curious About DVD Writers

Postby britre » Thu Apr 10, 2003 9:30 am

Anyone out there have a DVD Writer? If so, tell us the good, bad and ugly on these. Are they worth the money and time?

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balthazar
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Location: Stoughton, WI, USA
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dvd writers

Postby balthazar » Thu Apr 10, 2003 11:24 am

I don't actually own one, but the last place I worked did, and I was the one responsible for purchasing it, so here goes.

I worked for a photography studio, and we had a need to store groups of large (50 MB+) digital images all together. CDs, even at 700 MB, wasn't cutting it. A single wedding could have hundreds of frames shot, and even if we only saved the good ones we'd have gigabytes worth of pictures to store.

We examined the DVD option, and were at first struck with a format choice: DVD-R vs. DVD+R vs. DVD-RAM. Very subtle. DVD-RAM was the most expensive option in the long run, so that was quickly discarded. DVD-R and DVD+R were the choices left. We ended up with a drive from Pioneer, I think in DVD-R. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft decided to officially support DVD+R in the then forthcoming Windows XP.

It did the trick for us, but we weren't using it to store audio or video at the time. The drive was reliable, so long as the buffer could keep up, which meant transferring the files to the local hard drive instead of trying to burn from a network drive. It worked very much like a CD burner. It included software for viewing and creating video DVDs.

It paid for itself shortly, of course. We could get more than 10 times as much data on a DVD as on a CD. They stored well, as the boxes that rolls of Kodak photo paper came in were pretty much just the right size to file jewel boxes.

The downside was that we only had the one drive, and if we wanted to use a DVD, had to use the computer where it was installed.

I've heard of some issues with laser colors in the DVD burners vs. DVD players, where the DVD writer's reading laser will be just out of the tolerance range for the DVD player's reading laser.

I think the situation would depend on your needs or wants. Once you determine if you need a DVD writer, and what you're going to use it for, some research for compatibility, etc., might be in order.

Good luck.