Major Taiwanese CD-R disc makers are scaling up 48x disc production, with some advancing into 52x discs, while small manufacturers still struggle to improve yield rates for high-speed products. After starting 48x volume production in the summer, major disc makers Ritek, CMC Magnetics and Prodisc Technology said 48x discs will comprise nearly all of their CD-R shipments in the fourth quarter.

We thought we lighten up things a bit around here with a new Humour section on our links pages. We get the ball rolling with those boys at Lego Tech on Tour. If you would like to contribute a site please click on the add link link in the links section.

Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. (Sanyo) today announced that it has developed a new recordable optical disc technology named “HD-BURN” to realize two
times the capacity - 1.4GB - on existing CD-R media. “HD-BURN” will be incorporated with Sanyo’s SuperCombiDrive (CRD-DV2) shortly. Sanyo has finished standardization of this new recording technology already and started licensing at the same time.

We have managed to get a few Details of the NEC ND-1100 Combo +R –R DVD writer on initial examination it looks very similar to Sonys new multi-format DVD burner one initial observation is that it has slower CD/DVD (actually faster +R 4 speed!) recording speeds and supports the Mount Rainer (packet recording system)

We have some information and specs on two new set top DVD-R Recorders - the Pioneer DVR55 & DVR-77H.

We rely on insiders and industry sources to give us a lot of the information you read here – but that doesn’t mean we believe everything they tell us. Funny how things happen isn’t it?

I just got an email from the guys at Datasafe who were telling me they only intend selling their +R and +RW media with + drives and they have no intention of starting a price war..... when a mail dropped into my inbox from the other side of the world, and guess what? - it had a scan of both the new Datasafe plus format discs and an idea of how many discs were being packed for shipping.

Click to see the new Datasafe DVD+R and new Datasafe DVD+RW.

Pioneer Japan announced today the long awaited DVR-A05 DVD-R/RW recorder. This is the first DVD recorder that supports 4X writing with new highspeed DVD-R media and 2X re-writing with highspeed DVD-RW media.

Taiwanese source’s close to us revealed today that Datasafe have released a 1x speed disk that can record at x2 speed. We hear that the disk is labeled as x1 speed and is identical in all respects to the Datasafe Classic x1 DVD-R.

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. recently released research results on DVD format compatibility conducted by Intellikey Labs in July 2002

A summary of the Intellikey survey, which was funded by Pioneer, is as follows:

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Format Compatibility
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DVD-R 78 percent
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DVD+R 78 percent
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DVD-RW 58 percent
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DVD+RW 63 percent
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ALi Corporation (formerly Acer Laboratories) expects its monthly shipments of DVD player single chips to account for 10% of the company’s total DVD player chip shipments, said president Chin Wu.

The latest Pioneer "BUG FIX" firmware(s) remove the x2 speed burning for Ritek and CMC DVD-Rs which were introduced in firmware v1.31 (for the A04). Back to x1 for those disks!

Pioneer have today officially upgraded their recent firmware updates for the A03/103 and AO4/104 DVD recorders. This update request is launched because Pioneer found that the firmware of some of its DVD-R/RW Recorder / Writer drives contains a "bug" (malfunctioning code). This will cause the drives to overheat if any of the new (yet to be released) high speed media (4x & above) is used with the old firmware. The firmware affected is below 1.90 on the A03/103 and below 2.30 on the A04/104. The new firmware is 1.90 for the A03/103 and 1.32 for the A04/104. This firmware will not allow increased recording speeds above the maximum of 2X on these drives and in fact Pioneer claim they will only write at 1X on the new high speed media which is designed to be used in the new A05 drive.

Pioneer initially released the firmware 1.31 which enabled 2X write on certain Ritek media like Traxdata but after a dispute between Ritek & Pioneer it was removed with the 1.32 firmware.

Anyone applying this firmware which only affects the drives if the new high speed media (4x & above) is used should be aware that it is not downgradable.

You can download the new firmware here.

This is the first picture of the new FWS 2 speed DVD-R. The strange thing is the disc has no 2 speed markings?





Click here to see the new disc.

"A recent explosion at a US plant of Ineos Phenol, a unit of British chemical supplier Ineos Group, will have limited impact on the raw material supply for Taiwan’s CD-R disc makers, according to some disc makers in Taiwan.

A quick roundup of DVD-R media news:
The much talked about FWS 2 speed DVD-R disc should be released in the next 10 days.

As the price of DVD players continues dropping, demand for the less-costly DVD player single-chips has become much stronger, drawing more chip suppliers into the sector. Following Mediatek, ALi Corporation (formerly Acer Laboratories) and ESS Technology will soon start mass-producing single-chip products in the fourth quarter.

Our Taiwanese sources have shed new light on the story about Datasafe Media’s new interest in the +R/+RW format. Recently we revealed that Datasafe have arranged to distribute the new Sony DRU500A which will work with both +R and –R media.

The industry is today awash with rumours that Datasafe Media have struck a deal with Sony to distribute a new model of DVD writer - the DRU500A - which will support both the '+R' and the '-R' standards of blank DVD media.

Since installing the new firmware on both A03 & A04 some users have had bad burns on previously good media, thanks to our contributor Flash we have a link to a firmware flash utility that would flash any version up or down over any version.

Maxell Corporation of America, an engineering and marketing leader in recordable media products, posted top scores among media vendors in comprehensive DVD compatibility testing conducted by DV Magazine.