HP's DVD+RW/CD-RW Drive

Burning DVDs may be the next big thing, but at the price point of the gadgets, an external hard drive is still a cheaper solution if you're looking for a portable backup device. If you're planning on distributing home-made videos, VHS tapes are still your most affordable bet if you intend to share your memories with family and friends. Early adopters, however, always seem to help out in bringing down the price of tech products. You buy them, the powers that be lower the prices as the demand increases, and then the rest of us grunts who are further down the food chain pick them up when they become standards. Embracing the future sometimes has a higher price tag than some of us are willing to accept. At around $25 a pop, even burnable DVD disks are a little pricey, but when they get cheaper, it'll be cool to have the ability to offload massive amounts of data onto disks that will last (so the hype says) 100 years. Hewlett-Packard's new combination DVD+RW/CD-RW drive costs about as much as you'd spend building a mid-range PC, but it's significantly cheaper than you would have spent last year for a DVD burner. You can use it to create DVDs from your own videos using the DVD+RW format and transfer analog or digital video directly from a camcorder or VCR to a DVD disc. The dvd100i drive is bundled with HP MyDVD Video by Sonic Solutions, along with HP Recordnow by Veritas, HP DLA to let you drag and drop files to CD or DVD directly from applications, Power DVD by Cyberlink to play DVD movies on PCs, and HP Simple Backup to let you burn data. Specs include buffer underrun protection technology, 2.4x DVD (re-write), 8x DVD (read) speeds, 12x CD-R (write), 10x CD-RW (re-write), and 32x CD (read) speeds. The HP DVD-writer dvd100i drive should be available soon in Canada at an estimated CDN street price of $899.