Sony DVD-RW DRU530a
It’s hard to believe you can get a DVD-everything burner for $185. But you can, and it writes at nearly 8x if you have the right blank discs for it. Sony’s DVD-RW DRU530a is just such a dual-format DVD burner, which showed us an incremental improvement over its predecessor of two generations back that we tested nearly a year ago, the DRU500. And now, mere minutes before we published this article, Sony released an announcement stating it’s going to release a firmware update next month that should make the thing even faster. Let’s take it for a spin.First let’s address the claim to fame of the Sony DVD-RW DRU530a, the big selling point of this new drive: Speed. And speedy it is, but not as fast as I thought it would be. I find it odd that in its marketing materials for this product, Sony extols the virtues of 8x, but then suddenly, a month after release, offers a firmware update that allows the drive to burn DVDs at – you guessed it – 8x. Huh? Well, we took a look at what the drive can do now, and saw why Sony decided to release that update. The current product isn’t twice as fast as 4x. In our testing, our 2.29GB test file took 14:37 to write to a disc using 4x DVD-R media, and was noticeably faster writing to disc using the brand-new 8x DVD-R media provided to us by Verbatim, taking 13:19 to write the file to disc. That’s about a 10 percent speed difference, writing to disc at 3.03MB per second.
I expected it to be a lot faster than that, though, because when one disc says 4x on it and the other says 8x, I reasoned that the writing process would be twice as fast on the second disk as the first. But I’ve since learned that this Sony DVD drive can’t actually write at 8x the whole time – the inner part of the disc is only written at 4x, so there’s why the speed difference isn’t fully double that of a 4x disc. Nevertheless, the speed improvement is appreciated, and lots faster than the last disc burner from Sony we tested last year. We’ll ask Sony to let us hold onto this drive until that firmware update is released next month (in February, 2004), when we’ll test it again to see if there’s a measurable speed difference before and after installing the firmware update.
What else is in the box? Like the DRU500 that we tested previously, the DRU530a includes a full complement of DVD-related software, including Veritas RecordNow for mastering DVDs and CDs, Veritas Simple Backup, and the just-powerful-enough Sonic MyDVD for burning DVDs with your video content on them for playback in regular, garden-variety DVD players.
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Before I tell you about the rest of the software bundle, allow me to heap some much-deserved praise onto MyDVD by Sonic (see screen shot below). I really like this application, which drastically simplifies the DVD process. It even lets you capture footage from your camcorder and burn it directly to a DVD, a highly desirable operation in which many readers of Digital Media Net have expressed considerable interest. Well, if you’re looking for a way to make DVDs that’s just like dubbing your DV video onto a DVD, this is it. Of course, it takes a quite while longer than a tape-to-tape dub, allowing for processing the MPEG2 compression and lead-ins and lead-outs that are necessary with DVDs, but the process is just as easy. You can even do away with all menus whatsoever, and create your DVD so it will just begin playing right after you insert it into a player. And, if you want to add chapter markers, just hit the space bar while the “recording “ is in progress and sure enough, there they’ll be when you play back your DVD on almost any player.
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| Here’s a dialog box within MyDVD. Notice how the wizard interface just asks you if you want to record your footage to DVD. In this example, I have instructed it that I don't want any menus, just play the video when the DVD is inserted. After clicking Next, you initiate capturing from a DV camcorder with one click, and then the software compresses it into MPEG2 and burns it onto a DVD for you. |
There’s more software included in the bundle, too. If you want to get deeper into editing your footage, there’s still that basic nonlinear editing app in there, ArcSoft ShowBiz. It’s OK for separating the wheat from the chaff, but most readers of these sites will be familiar with (and probably own) much more sophisticated editing applications. Last but certainly not least is a welcome addition since the last time we rummaged around in Sony’s software bundle: Drive letter access software, affectionately known as DLA. This lets you treat a DVD-RW or DVD+RW just like any other hard drive, dragging and dropping files to it. This in itself is an enormously convenient little applet, where you can back up files on the fly without even having to think twice about it. Too bad it doesn’t work with any of the write-once formats like DVD-R and DVD+R.
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