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Introduction:::...
I
was wandering around my local and predictably overpriced
PC superstore over the weekend and was taken aback
at how low the price of DVD burners had become. Even
in this bastion of retail robbery it seemed I could
pick up an eight speed dual format internal drive
for significantly less than £100!
That's
what happens see. You save up, you buy, then as soon
as you turn your back the prices drop like a stone
in a vacuum. It's frustrating but it's the way it's
always been.
While
there are lots of exciting transitions still in the
pipeline for the humble DVD including dual layer recording,
blue lasers and paper disks to name but a few, we're
still seeing new products appearing that build on
advances in unrelated technologies, technologies like
USB2.0 and the not quite so new IEEE1394 Firewire
standard. Admittedly these don't directly impact the
technology needed to burn a track on a blank, but
they do open up the option to make the devices portable
and let them connect externally without throttling
the data throughput.
The
unit I'm looking at today is an 8-speed external dual
standard, dual interface DVD burner from Amacom Technologies,
a good, solid and increasingly rare UK manufacturer
specialising in portable storage.
If,
like I was, you're wondering why anyone would want
a portable DVD burner when nearly every PC around
now features at least one DVD-ROM drive, then think
laptops and think what happens not when you need to
take your data to another machine but when you need
to bring another machine's data to you. Flash drives
are certainly cheap, but until they come in 4GB versions
they're not much use for large scale data shipping.
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