Too hot, no stock!
Written: Dec 12 '02 (Updated Feb 24 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Compatible to all DVD formats of interest at a very good price.
Cons: Pricey compared to a CD burner.
The Bottom Line: You get all the compatibility with marginally more money than the other drives. Price couldn't get much lower so get it if you can get hold of it.
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| yoshimato's Full Review: Sony DRU 500A DVD±RW Burner |
Updated on DLA software problems, media compatibility, and copying 2 layer discs
Why you want this Sony DVD burner and why you want any DVD burner?
This is the first burner that is compatible to all the format of interest. If you buy this you will be compatible to most existing DVD players in the living room, and all later model players. You will be compatible to any existing disc burnt on the computer given to you, and you can burn disc that is compatible to any existing computer DVD drives. Of course this is compatible to all CD players and disc.
The price is under $300 including shipping! A blank DVD is about $1.5 each for a pack of 25. $0.6 for higher volume purchase with no brand name. Soon I'll probably sent out a DVD like AOL instead of a nice greeting card. How else you can entice someone to watch your home movies? At least not mine.
You can edit your digital camcorder movies and burn your own DVD so you can access them easily and watch much more often in the living room. It's the only practical way to do away with storing them in the mini DV tapes, and DVD's are several times cheaper. You can capture your analog VCR library for some $150 hardware and software, and burn them to DVD. Again down to 60 cents each.
I almost forget, now you have those ATI graphics card which is not only good enough for gamers, but also big time crouch potatoes. You can tune to TV and cable stations, capture program, with TV guide system, watch TV with TiVo / Replay TV like modes. The card also has output to the computer monitor and also has s-video output to your TV, at the same time! With the DVD burner, you got yourself a DVD recorder as well.
With free and trivial to download and trivial to use software like DVD Decrypter (do a search on the web if you are interested), you can, but you shouldn't, “back up” and watch any DVD title, any region, any number of times, any time. The current law suits against DVD copying software are jokes. If you rent DVDs via Netflix for $20 month, you can have 30 DVD passing through your hands a month. The thought horrifies me. However the major obstacle to copying DVD isn't the encryption, but the common 2 layer disc that many Hollywood comes in. Although the main movie isn't that big in data size, they give you director's cut, director's commentary, and other stuff that make the data amount much bigger than a normal movie. These 2 layer disc are bigger than a standard 4.7 GB DVD. The Sony, and all other in this price range, can't do 2 layers and therefore copying these movies are a big headache. After some research, Infoedit can easily split a 2 layer disc into 2 singer layer disc. Though those guys have a problem explaining it to you. It is a lot easiler than the explanation given.
On the computer side, each disc have 4.7 GB, that's a lot of CD's at 640 MB (1G >= 1000M). A rewritable disc is very handy for backup like a small but reliable disk drive.
The chase
As you know from my reviews, I assemble my own computers. I am happily using my old CD drive because there's no strong reason to get a CD burner. I'm not a big music fan. And the technology trend is to skip the CD burner for music. MP3's going straight into the huge 'hard disk' or 'memory' of the MP3 player. I have plenty of hard disk space for the digital camera so far on my PC. There's no way you can handle video on hard disk or CD. So I keep all the VCR tapes, mini DV tapes, and old photo on paper, and wait until the DVD burner price to come down. $1000 is way too high. At the $500 mark it might be considered. But then you start worrying about the formats and compatibility. Until one day my CD drive stops working just like that, probably because of unusual old age.
To my surprise, the Sony came to the rescue. It's about $350 and is compatible to all the formats of interest. I found lower prices but they are either out of stock or accepting orders but not actually shipping. I desperately need any drive to install all the recently acquired hardware and software. With the coming holiday season, there is the potential of shipping chaos, and I don't trust unknown stores that didn't say clearly whether they have it or not. So I think of good old Circuit City. I think I can just go inside and get one so I delayed for a few days. Then when I check again on the website they are all gone. Not even through online order from their warehouse. I check a few Circuit City stores and they are gone. Until I found one in Santa Ana. I placed the order online and I was going out of the door to drive there, to catch may be the last one on the shelf if I can. Then I received a phone call telling me that they don't actually have it. That was a mistake. I said cancel it and there was silence on the other end – he hang up. Some time later I got another call. I said cancel and he dealt with it properly.
Since I have to wait anyway I try to find good deals online with reliable stores. I found Datavision, the East Coast counterpart of Circuit City. Surprise surprise, not only that they have it in stock, it's only $330 tax free. I paid $343 including shipping. But there is a $50 mail in rebate! So that's under $300 inclusive of everything. Actually if I buy one or two days earlier, I couldn't have the rebate. Not a bad price but you have to wait a few days for the thing to move coast to coast.
The formats
First, let's get DVD-RAM out of the way. It's not for and not compatible with DVD movies or anything else. It's intended for data and use like a hard drive. The specifications are higher – speed, capacity, and number of read write cycles. The discs are housed in a tray and insert to the drive that way. All these means pricey on its own. The RAM disc are rewritable – 'erase' and written over again and again. There are drives that are compatible with video DVD formats and DVD-RAM, but they are pricey. The Sony is compatible with all possible formats except DVD-RAM, and there is no current burners with the Sony capability plus DVD-RAM compatibility.
At the simple end, CDs have only one format. So any burner is compatible to any disc and to any read-only drive and to any music CD equipment, perhaps unless your disc or equipment is ancient. There are two types of disc – CD-R for recordable once and CD-RW that can be erased and written over time and time again. MP3 and music CD are not compatible in the application level – the same disc and drive are used for both, and also used for video format VCD and SVCD.
On the DVD side there are two competing standards – the *(plus) camp and the – (minus) camp. I use the * sign to stand for the plus sign because the add sign got deleted by Epinions software automatically. For each standard, they have R for recordable once disc and RW for recordable repeatedly disc. So you have DVD-R, DVD-RW versus DVD*R and DVD*RW. Strictly speaking a movie DVD is none of the above but any * or - drive can play movie DVDs (except for DVD-RAM drives). So there are only two camps but there are two more formats, DVD-video for hollywood movies and DVD-ROM, similar to DVD-video but also suitable for data storage. But don't worry about these two formats because all * or – drive can read the DVD-video format, most – and all * drive reads DVD-ROM, and there are no burners for the PC that burn these formats. Now which one of the */- camp got potential and do you need all of them?
For the living room DVD players, it is possible they don't play any of the * or – formats. But later models do. I remember a survey saying that 90% play * disc and somewhat less play – disc. This is not surprising because the - format is earlier but the * format is supported by a lot of manufacturers. The percentage is higher for later models. But my Apex plays both * and – all along. An R disc can be burnt only once while a RW disc can be burnt many times. If you don't want the Sony, be sure to check your players capability on the web, both camps list compatible players on their website.
For the PC drive it's another story. My impression is that half the drive are * only and half are – only. Some manufacturers support both formats, but not on the same burner! Except of course this Sony burner. If you don't get the Sony, that's what will happen. Someone may send you a home movie disc or a movie copy that you cannot read. You may burnt a movie that someone cannot read. With the Sony you can play any movie. If someone can't read your movie for the first time, they sure can the second time if you give them the other format.
Here is a little bit of background about the format wars. The minus format is basically an Apple format! This is the first DVD format compatible available for consumer burners and is developed by Pioneer. As with any Apple formats, a lot of PC manufacturers won't allow it. Apple gave us firewire. Most digital camcorders have that. Firewire evolved into an IEEE standard, so PC manufactorers don't need to call it firewire. Now we have USB2.0, which is faster, and most newer PC supports it. Totally unnecessary, they can use firewire instead of USB1. And even now firewire is just a bit slower than USB2. Same here fore the plus format. The big name PC manufacturers support plus. Microsoft support plus, and will integrate that into windows, just like that you can burn CD using drag and drop of files. Other consumer electronics manufacturers support plus to avoid the lead by Pioneer. Microsoft support may mean something but may also flop. Sony had the bad experience of losing the VCR format battle. If you count the number of supports, plus has the edge. If you look at the price of discs, minus is a lot cheaper. Sony add the minus format to their line of plus drives to give you this multi-format drive. This may tell you something, or not.
Another consideration is the price of disc. For write once R discs, the cheapest is -R at about $1.5 each in bulk, $0.6 for larger bulk and no brand name. *R is price is unattractive at the moment, could be say two times more and over. Rewritable RW discs are more expensive. A -RW disc doesn't cause much more than a -R disc. But a *RW disc cost a lot more than a *R disc. A brand name disc like Sony DVD*RW can cost more than $10 each. So currently the – camp win over in price but this may change in the future. If the * camp wins over more manufacturers then the volume increases and the price drops. More likely there will be only one format in the future. But your Sony will still be compatible will all the disc being burnt now and until that day. For the inherent advantages of each camp you have to look at the specifications.
The specifications
The first speed is read speed and the second if any is write speed. The DVD speed is relative to the movie playing speed and the CD speed is relative to music playing speed.
____________________READ______WRITE
DVD R_______________2.4x______2.4x
DVD RW______________2.4x______2.4x
DVD-R_______________2x________4x
DVD-RW______________2x________2x
DVD-ROM_____________8x-CAV
DVD-Video___________2x
CD-R________________32x-CAV___24x-ZCLV
CD-RW (high speed)__32x-CAV___10x
CD-RW_______________32x-CAV___4x
CD-ROM______________32x-CAV
CD-DA_______________4x
CD-DA (DAE)_________32x-CAV
I think this is the fastest DVD burner you can get, because everybody is the same at 2x for -R and 2.4x for *R. And 4x write for -R is very new. However, there are faster CD burners. So don't be surprised that someone has one DVD burner plus one CD burner. To play this game you can add another two - a super fast DVD drive and another even faster CD drive, because read only drive were faster than burners.
Still, be careful to compare speed. If some other drive claim to 8X read speed, it's probably only apply to DVD-ROM format. Sony now have software download to improve the reading speed and support 4X burning for more formats.
The Sony can read and write normal 12 cm disc but can only read 8 cm disc. Unless your computer is ancient, you have ATAPI and 4.8 Mb/s capable ultra-DMA that the Sony needs.
There is an item called buffer underrun error protection. By the way the buffer size is 8 MB in the drive. The Sony uses Power-Burn technology for CD and Lossless Linking for DVD. You have to use software that supports the same protection. But if your computer is fast enough, you probably don't need it. The DVD Decrypter don't support this and I have no write errors.
It's confusing but let's get rid of the CD format's first. Basically any CD drive and of course DVD drive can read all CD formats. You write on R discs faster and in general each format has different speeds. A higher speed disc cost you more money at the beginning. Since now they are dirt cheap and only the highest speed disc remains. You cannot exceed the write speed rating on the disc. The speed is relative to the normal audio playing speed. If a song last for 3 minutes, it takes 1.5 minute to burn it for a 2x writer.
It's similar for DVD but no burner except the Sony do all of the DVD formats listed here. This is not very true. Verbatim and Pioneer tell you via Sony that some -R disc may not work. 2X DVD-R from Verbatim before 10/31/2002 may not work and two models from the Pioneer DVD-R may not work.
The * format has only 1 speed at 2.4x. Loosely speaking the – format has also only 1 speed at 2x. So the * camp is 20% faster. The speed is relative to the normal video playing time. That's considerable time saving as you save 10 min on the hour. High speed DVD-R disc at 4x is new and rare. If you can find it at a reasonable price, your Sony can write that fast. 4X is a fight back for the -R camp. If my math is right, you only gain slightly when you copy (read and write) a DVD in the – format but it's a mass duplicator's heaven half the time for each duplicate.
There is also a subtle difference between * and - drives. For the - drives you need software formatting. For the * drives, the formatting is the responsibility of the drive. But that's acadamic - any DVD burner software will deal will all that transparently. Although you may see that it takes a while for the - drives to format before writing. The * drives seem to start writing right away but actually the formatting is being done in the background in the drive.
To give you some idea, copying a normal movie takes half hour to read I think and another half hour to write, all for 2x. Who's watching the clock? I went to watch TV when I'm copying. Each side or layer on a DVD can store 4.7 GB. So some DVD has a capacity larger than 4.7 GB with 2 sides or two layers. It's not uncommon for movies DVD's larger than 4.7 GB with all the versions of the movie and special features and sound tracks. But the Sony can't burn more than 4.7 GB on a disc, I don't think any burner for the PC do that with reasonable price.
The installation
A home theater receiver seems to be more complicated than this. Mine is stand alone without the DVD player. It's a huge audio and video switch and you can connect TV, DVD, VCR, CD player to it. It's daunting. And the surround speakers are identical to the front speakers except for the model number. And I couldn't find out anywhere which number is the front and which is the surround speakers.
You only need to make two connections for the burner, one to the mother board and one for the power. Nowadays everything is color coded and polarized, that means you couldn't go wrong. If you have only one hard drive, you do not need to do anything. Just use the same socket as your CD drive. Though you have to unscrew and open the computer. Being a consumer giant, the burner comes with easy to follow diagrams to show you that.
Being a Sony, the drive looks rather cool. There a transparent plastic slab in front with the Sony logo. Under the slab is reflective silver material. The combination looked much cooler in the fresh than the photo. Unlike older CD drives, there's no sound output and volume control. That's unnecessary and too simple for today's faster computers.
The bundled software
I think most of the software could be free, or bundled with a lot of other DVD related hardware.
RecordNow
CD and DVD burner. When you have various audio files, burn it with RecordNow. You can copy non protected DVD. You can copy data from hard disk to CD or DVD. You have to download the upgrade for free.
MusicMatch JukeBox
Burn music CD only, but you can listen to internet radio.
Simple Backup
Simple backup for data onto CD or DVD.
PowerDVD
A popular DVD player to watch movies on your PC. But the real player or quick time player you may already have can play DVD movies. Not to mention windows media player.
MyDVD
DVD (and CD) authoring tool. You can edit video from your DV camcorder or other video capture device and burn DVD or CD's. MyDVD has a useful direct to DVD feature that skips the step of storing the entire movie on hard disk first. However, it's editing capability is less than more popular software such as Ulead Video Studio, which is often bundled with camcorders and other video capture device. You have to download the update myDVD version for free.
DLA
Sony also advises you to download this free software. With it you can use the DVD drive as any hard drive, i.e., it looks the same as other drives on your desktop, you drag and drop you files or folders into or out of it. Unlike most CD DLA burner software, it supports only RW media, even for CD.
Get use to it. Nowadays you get bundled with software highly overlapping in function, and some are probably free in the first place. I'm not surprised if they actually pay sony to get in the bundle, so someone will try and pay for their upgrade versions. Worse, similar hardware bundle you with similar set of software but different. Say for a printer and scanner you get the same or different photo editing software. The same for a DVD burner, player, DV camcorder and analogue video to digital converter. It's hard to know at a glance what to use and whether they are the most updated version.
The test
Not much of a test as a drive is a drive and it works. I tried several times the Sony DVD RW disc that comes with the burner, which would cost over $10 on the open market. I copied several movies on DVD-R at $1.5 each. The software reports the expected reading and writing speeds. I didn't encounter any read and write errors. All formats work on my Apex DVD play in the living room. I have a 1.8 GHz P4 with 256 MB RDRAM, using XP.
I rate the easy of use as average based on the way Sony bundle software. The drive is no easier and no harder to use than any other drive. You do need some time to learn to burner a DVD. In the older days you buy a hardware and you run the software supplied. Now you have a whole bunch of software to go with your hardware. You don't know where to start. But nowadays everybody do it like this.
Future Trend
One reason you want to hold back from buying the Sony is MPEG-4 or DivX. This is the DVD's equivalent to MP3 for audio CD. DVD is based on MPEG-2 compression. With MPEG-4, you can put a DVD movie on a CD and watch on any computers, without noticeable loss of quality, and so it claims. Living room DVD players can be compatible if they choose to do it tomorrow. You just need to update the decoder software or hardware. But it's highly unlikely that this will hurt sales of DVD burner. People will just want to put more movies into a DVD instead of going back to CD.
DVD may not be the solution you want to replace your DV tapes. DVD is a highly compressed format compared to DV. DV is compressed but not efficient. DVD is very high quality but you do have some losses. Perhaps invisible for TV's but may have a slight difference on HDTV. VCR tapes is a totally different story. VCR is not even as good as broadcast TV. So it's overkill to convert VCR tapes to DVD and you won't be afraid of losing anything. You just notice clearly the deficiencies of VCR sources on you DVD.
And of course the price will keep on falling, and the speed increasing. Weight your opportunity costs. Since my CD drive broke down, this Sony is a sensible point for me to jump in. However, last year the Apex 1500 DVD player is at $70 if you get rebates and everything, this year the player is still standing at $69. This may be a different story as the price cannot be driven down by 'faster' DVD players, but there are affordable DVD recorders on the horizon to drive the price of these drives down.
Updates
DLA problems
Now the DVD software from Veritas are acquired by Sonic, to become the leading DVD software house. True of not, softwore from the two brands are very popular, which can be bundled in a lot of DVD burners, camcorders, and video capture devices. I am pointing this out to say that if there is problem, it's not limited to Sony, but to a few other burners that bundled with Veritas or Sonic software. The problem is for people who are very familiar with burning CDs. DLA stands for drive letter access, which allows you to burn CD/DVD by simpling copying files into the drive - the same as you copy any other files into any other drives.
The now still downloadable Veritas DLA software doesn't support any R media, not even CD-R. There may be a few reasons.
a) get you to pay for the full version. DLA is now included in RecordNow MAX, which I think supports recordable once media.
b) its very inefficient to support R formats. They waste a lot of disc space, and they take a long time to format the whole disc first. In contrast, a DVD RW disc is ready to use in a few minutes.
c) you probably can get away with not supporting CD-R as CD-RW is about the same price for consumers. The price of DVD-R and DVD-RW is getting close.
The other problem is that DLA conflicts with any other burning software, including the CD burning software in XP. This is natural because DLA needs to be tightly integrated with windows. There's no standard yet for DVD, each drive is different and uses it own software to integrate. There are standards for CD after so long, which went into XP. The real problem is that you can only use one DLA software, but the Veritas DLA has less functionality than most CD burner. Alternatively, you can wait for your favourite software to include the DVD functionalities.
This is very frustrating but that doesn't affect that many users, like me. This problem only apply to data files. You can still use R media any other burner software like RecordNow. The interface is still easy - drag and drop. Just not the same as copying of files in windows. Not that many people burn a lot of R only disc, bit by bit at different times, with different files. Say for backup purposes, a RW DVD make a lot more sense. Say for distribution purposes, disc are burnt when all the files to be distributed are known.
Media compatibility
I use the bargain basement discs. DVD-R from Meritline.com and CD-R Supermediastore.com. I did bulk purchase first time without any media problems. But Meritline suggests you to but from them some media sampler, which contains different brands of different media, so you can confirm the compability first before bulk purchase.
Copying 2 layer DVDs
The software to use is infoedit. But the authors don't bother or aren't capable to write manuals. It's simpler than the procedures that you can find. Also, the user interfaces of these software are also 101. In the old days without GUI, there are bad dialogues, one question and one answer at a time. The same questions are asked no mater what. Now they just put everything on the GUI. All the functions can be accessible via the menu, but doesn't help you to choose any of them. I'll try to contribute something back.
By the way, I now have a Sony check of $50 for the rebate.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 330
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
yoshimato
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Location: Beach Cities, CA, USA
Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
Among other things I reviewed, I also like writing, or more appropriately, being read.
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