Petteri Pyyny
19 Mar 2004 14:43
Sony has unveiled its first dual layer DVD recorders, the 700 series. The new drives will feature a 2.4x dual layer DVD+R DL recording in addition to the more common single layer 8x DVD-R and DVD+R recording and 4x DVD-RW/DVD+RW recording.
The internal drive, called Sony DRU-700A is expected to cost $230 and should be available, according to Sony, in second quarter of this year. Meanwhile various major media manufacturers have also announced the availability of dual layer DVD+R DL discs.
Dual layer recording makes the process of backing up DVD movies much easier as the most common DVD disc format nowadays, the DVD-9, will fit on one disc directly without any re-encoding or removing extra features from the disc. So far the only option has been to re-encode DVD-9 discs to fit onto single layer DVD-5 -sized recordable discs.
Sony also announced that once DVD Forum finalizes the dual layer DVD-R specs that Pioneer submitted to the Forum back in October 2003, company will add support for that one as well (assuming that such support doesn't require any hardware modifications but can be done by upgrading the firmware instead).
Source: EMediaLive.com