DVD-ROMs start shipping. Sigma has a lot of slots in the up-grade kits...............................
techweb.com
November 09, 1998, Issue: 1423
Section: VARBusiness Labs
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DVD Drives Designed To Do Damage -- We Review Six DVD Drives To See Which Offers The Best Upgrade Opportunities
David Gabel, Executive Technology Editor
The next step in optical storage is the DVD (it stands for Digital Versatile Disk) drive. These drives have been slow to gain market acceptance, largely, one supposes, because their predecessors, CD-ROM drives, continue to gain in performance. While the CD-ROM drives are revving up to as much as 40x speeds, DVD-ROM drives are literally limping along at roughly 20x, in CD-ROM terms. So DVD-ROM drives are left with only increased capacity as a reason to buy. This may be changing now as DVD-RAM is coming on the scene, making lots and lots of rewritable storage available for reasonable prices. There are some flies in the ointment there as well, however, with new standards for recordable DVD proliferating.
But OEMs are beginning to ship DVD-ROM drives in their desktop systems. Now users can get systems with high-capacity DVD-ROM storage coupled with MPEG-2 video playback, which provides a much more enjoyable home entertainment experience than was available with CD-ROM and either MPEG-1 or software MPEG. All this could spark demand for DVD-ROM drives as upgrades to existing CD-ROM-equipped machines.
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