Six leading optical storage companies jointly revealed plans for shipping rewritable DVD drives and media.

Hewlett-Packard, MCC/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony and Yamaha collaborated in the announcement, made at PC Expo in New York.

HP, Sony and Philips announced that limited quantities of DVD+RW drives are currently being made available to strategic customers, with worldwide volumes expected to begin shipping this fall.

MCC/Verbatim verified that it would ship DVD+RW media in the fall. Ricoh and Yamaha did not make specific product-availability announcements, but confirmed their commitment to the DVD+RW format.

The 3GB DVD+RW specification is expected to appeal to home- and business-PC users who use memory-intensive applications that require high performance and capacity, such as multimedia, graphics, CAD, document imaging, digital photography and video applications.

In addition to DVD+RW media, DVD+RW drives can read DVD-ROM, DVD movie, CD-RW, CD-Recordable (CD-R), CD-ROM and CD audio.