14 DAY TRIAL // Sony Electronics announced the release of its next generation DVD burner that supports the dual format DVD/CD recordable drives and comes in three separate designs in order to meet the industry's fastest recording speeds.
This new series is called the 840 and it fully supports the 20X DVD?R recording speeds, being capable of burning through a 4.7GB chunk of data on a standard 16X DVD+R supported media in about five minutes. Other capabilities include the possibility to record 8.5GB DVD+R Double/Dual layer optical disks and 4.7GB DVD+RW discs at 12X speed. The new 800 series comes in three distinct flavors: the internal DRU-840A drive, the external DRX-840U burner and the slim external DRX-S70U burner intended to be a notebook companion. Both the internal and the external versions of the DVD/CD burner come bundled with Nero's burning software (Nero 7 Express DVD/CD mastering software for the DRU-840A and DRX-840U models and a full version of the Nero 7 for the slim external model).
The internal drive, model DRU-840A, comes equipped with an ATAPI interface for easy installation and has a front side case replacement, black colored, for use in black computer cases. The interface of the external drives, both normal sized and the slim one, is USB version 2.0 compatible and they feature a vertical space saving design.
"Our new high speed drives were designed at the optimum price/performance level for consumers looking to store and share home movies, digital photos and music. They are also fit for businesses deploying DVD video-based training and sharing large files, as well as for filmmakers creating prototypes on recordable/rewritable DVD discs before proceeding with mass replication," said Robert DeMoulin, marketing manager for branded storage products in Sony Electronics? IT Products Division, who was cited by the computer news site BurnWorld.
According to the very same site, the internal optical burner is available for around $70, while the external versions, due to come out sometime during the next month, will be priced at $110 and $130, respectively.