Sony DVD-RW DRU530a
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If all that software’s not enough, the drive can handle just about any disc unless it’s an old 78 RPM shellacked and varnished analog record. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but just like Sony’s earlier models, this drive is a DVD polyglot. Without typing up an alphabet soup replete with plusses and minuses, I’ll just mention that this drive speaks nearly every DVD and CD recording tongue except DVD-RAM, and who needs that any more, anyway? As I was working with this fine DVD burner, I started thinking about the overall context of DVD creation in general and the progress the products and their software have made over the past year or two. A remarkable aspect about this Sony DVD hardware (and all the other DVD players, too) is the way they cooperate with the operating systems underneath them, namely Windows XP or Mac OS X, making them nearly effortless to install. I’m not kidding when I say that all I had to do was get the drive into the computer case, plug it into the drive ribbon and power connector, and then we were off and running. After installing the aforementioned software bundle, we were ready to do anything we wanted to do with DVDs. The DVD experience nowadays is drastically easier than it was even a couple of years ago. The price of the drives themselves are about a fifth of what they once were, the software is now so user-friendly that a trained seal could make it work, and the price of blank DVD media is hovering around the just-north-of-free range. Best of all, nearly everybody and his brother has a DVD player now, and almost all of those players can play any disc coming out of this burner. It’s close to a perfect distribution medium, short of no discs at all (there I go, extolling that “bits instead of atoms” thing again).
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But I digress. How did I like the Sony DRU530a? I think it does an admirable job, at a bargain price. I think it brings this product category one step closer to maturity. But I must simultaneously applaud and damn Sony for offering firmware that can make the product actually do what the company said it could do when it was first released. As for the overall time it takes to create a DVD, I think the writing speed is a lot faster than the rest of the time-consuming process of making DVDs, so you can’t blame this burner for the lengthy rendering and waiting for DVDs to be finished. Now, we’ll just have to wait for computer speed to increase, as it always does, and then the entire process will be fast. Until then, the Sony DRU530a will keep up quite nicely. As it is now, it’s recommended, and I assume it will be an even stronger product once that firmware update comes along.
Digital Media Net Executive Producer Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist since 1994, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor, broadcast industry consultant and shot-calling television director who has worked in broadcasting since 1974. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.Read Charlie White's editorials by clicking here.
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