Price Guides, August 2005: Storage

Optical Storage

As bland as the Optical Storage market was last month, this month is even worse. Both best of breed drives, the NEC 3540 and the BenQ DW1640, come in just under $45 shipped. Now that the NEC 3540A [RTPE: ND-3540A] has matured a bit the drive is very attractive. The BenQ DW1640 [RTPE: BenQ DW1640], on the other hand, performed well in our recent 16X DVDR roundup. We are keeping our eye on some other drives, like the Plextor 740A as well, but no one can touch NEC or BenQ right now as far as quality and price is concerned; 8X DVD+DL works just fine on the newest Verbatim media in our lab.

Pioneer also quietly unveiled their DVR-110D [RTPE: Pioneer DVR-110]. Although Pioneer used to be the DVD-R champion many years ago, they are not really in the same position to recapture the market from the likes of NEC; particularly when NEC can undercut everyone (including Lite-On) on component cost. We also started to track HP's LightScribe units over the last few weeks, the HP DVD640I [RTPE: Q6766A]. Without much competition, LightScribe drives will continue to be much too expensive to warrant a recommendation from AnandTech, but since NEC is due to release a LightScribe drive in the next few weeks we might actually see some healthy competition in that field. Until then, I have a Sharpie...