The ever-changing optical media market has recently experienced a growing consumer demand for write-once media. The newer options available on the market today are designed to store considerably more memory. Despite this, rewriteable discs remain popular because they are capable of being rewritten many more times over than their predecessors.
"Home recording habits are definitely gravitating towards the hard disc/solid state memory devices - write-once media such as CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R," explains Kabelo Ditlopo, product manager, HP, 4COS Optical Media, Sony storage and media, Axiz.
He says the impact of the DVD on the blank media industry has been significant and as a result, blank media manufacturers are shifting their emphasis from CD-R to DVD. "The rapid growth in DVD reflects the growing trend to use home DVD recorders and PC burners as an integral source of home entertainment."
DVD+R - Dual-layer and DVD-RAM discs are growing in interest among the early adopters. DVD+R is a newer write-once standard allowing 8.5Gb of data to be recorded on a single disk and shares the same capacity and form factor of its siblings. The DVD+RW is the newer re-writable standard, which is also becoming increasing popular.
DVD-RAM compared with other writeable DVDs is more closely related to hard disc technology, as it has concentric tracks instead of one long spiral track. Unlike the competing formats DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW, special DVD burning software is not required to write or read DVD-RAMs on a computer. They can be accessed like a usual floppy disk or hard drive. "These discs can be rewritten 100 000 times, 100 times more than either DVD-RW or DVD+RW, the other two rewritable DVD formats," explains Ditlopo. "DVD-RAM drives can usually read both DVD video discs and DVD-ROM discs, as well as any type of CD."
"If you`re buying optical media to use in a living-room DVD recorder, pay close attention to speed ratings, especially on the rewritable side. If your recorder is an older model, it may have difficulties recognising newer, faster media - let alone recording to newer discs," advises Ditlopo.
Optical media is evolving and who knows what the future holds - one thing is for sure, we know it will hold a lot more memory!
For more information, please contact Axiz on (011) 237 7105.
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