News about DVD media for dual layer and 16x

March 21, 2004

Again Heise presents us some news from CeBIT 2004. This time they have some news about upcoming recordable DVD media. Now that dual layer drives are announced for April and 16x drives for June/July, buyers of these drives still need proper media in order to take advantage of these capabilities.

Media manufacturer Verbatim announced that production of dual layer media (DVD+R9) with a capacity of 8.5 GB will already start at the end of March, but the first batches will be sent out to drive manufacturers for test and the main part will be used for bundling with retail drives. Only very few pieces will be available on the market. Too few to satisfy the demand. Only from the beginning of Q3/2004 in July, mass production will be running at full speed, so that media will be widely available in stores. In the beginning, Verbatim expects a price of up to 2.5 times as much as that for a single layer disc - that will be about 5 to 6 Euro. The production costsare - according to insiders - still three or four times as high as that for single layer discs, but that will decrease with raising production capacities.

At this later point of time, Ricoh also wants to deliver their dual layer recordables. Ricoh chose a slightly different production process than Verbatim. As a result they need a little longer in the beginning, but afterwards they benefit from shorter production times which means cheaper production costs for media. Ricoh also sees the beginning of Q3/2004 for starting the supply of their DVD+R9, just like the Taiwanese media producer Ritek.

The first 16x discs will not be available before September, because the DVD+RW alliance won't adopt the official specifications before July. "Before this, we will not be able to produce our stampers for manufacturing and it will take at least two months until media is pressed, verified and sent to stores" said Thorsten Leye, Verbatim product manager. Ricoh and Ritek expect to sell 16x media at the end of the year.

The 16x technique requires for manufacturing of media as well as for that of drives a new and very precise production technique. So it is possible that it will take some more time for drives and media if there are further complications. By the way, none of the media manufacturers is going to create 12x media.

It looks like we will be able to buy dual layer and 16x drives within the next few months, but we will not be able to write to these kinds of media in the beginning, just because they only exist in homeopathic quantities. So it will probably be better to wait with buying these drives until the media is available. So we will probably also benefit from cheaper drives.

Although it is not said explicitly in the original article, we only deal with Plus-media. Now I'm asking myself what is happening to DVD-R. As almost no 8x media is available yet, one does not dare about thinking of dual layer or 16x media. So the DVD forum will have to hurry up if they want to stay competitive as it currently looks like plus and minus will coexist, but without further and particularly faster improvements, minus media may still fall behind.

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Source: Heise.de