Production costs for HDD (hard disk drive) DVD recorders remain high and difficult to drop due to few back-end LSI (large scale integration) ICs and no locally produced HDDs for leading Taiwanese makers, according to local industry sources.

In a typical 160 GByte HDD DVD recorder, the HDD components and LSI ICs account for 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of the production price while loaders and pick-up heads take up another 20 percent, the sources pointed out.

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