Your best bet would be either Pioneer or Plextor also dont forget Sony is a
very good brand also since I have an internal Sony DRU-710A DL DVD burner and
have been using Verbatum DVD+R DL disks with it. My Sony NVP-NS425P standalone
DVD player plays the disk without incident. With a 8.5 GB unformated raw data
capacity I can burn 2 to 4 - 2 and a half movies or 6 1 hour TV shows to a
DVD+R DL but this realy depends on what form of mpeg encoding that I use. I use
mpeg-2 for the encoding, the bit rate of between 5000 to 6150 KBps and frame
rate (NTSC 30 fps).
I still have to play with mpeg-4 with my Nero 6 Showtime 3.0 as I learn more
about this new format.
I just mention this for information's sake but you wanted an external DVD
burner so either Pioneer, Plextor or Sony would make some good choices for your
external DVD burner.
I'd stay away from DVD-RAM becuase its fast becomming phased out and there are
very few manufacturers who are still using it. Plus its not a playback standard
for most DVD players becuase most DVD players can play DVD+R or DVD+R DL.
Besides if you go into any Circuit City, Best Buy or Staples just look at the
shelf space that these disk take up. From my observation they bearly take up
one quarter of shelf space in terms of display on the store shelfs. IMHO
DVD-RAM can be religated to a permanent non-multimedia storage media.
Right now the dominate disk formats are DVD+-R and DVD+R DL which are slowly
climbing the scales as more manufactures upgrade their DVD+R DL DVD bunners.
Manufacturers like Pioneer, Sony, Plextor, memorex, TDK, LiteOn, HP and others
are releasing new 16X upgrades to their 8X model lines.
The Verbatum DVD+R DL disk are pretty expensive costing $34.95 a pack and only
come in a 3-pack but I can get much cheaper DVD+R DL disk from mwave.com.
Marc Sims
Technician I
Technology Services
Prince George's Community College
301 Largo Rd.
Largo, MD 20774-2199
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wednesday, May 25, 2005 >>>
Hi,
I plan on buying an external DVD burner in the near future. It seems like the
best (most recent, priciest, whatever) models I can find for the main vendors I
considered are:
Sony - DRX-800UL
Plextor - PX-740A
Pionner - DVR-S806
NEC - ND-6500A
with Sony and Plextor being in the lead because they seem to promise something
the others don't, DVD-R DL. I had also considered the Toshiba External USB 2.0
Slimline DVD SuperMulti Drive because a friend has a pioneer dvr and this drive
seems to promise that I would be able to share DVD-RAM disks with him. However,
I don't necessarily want to give up the DVD-R DL option for him if it is
definitely something worth having.
Can anybody suggest a better model from these vendors or possibly another
vendor that I should also consider? Also, does anyone have an opinion on the
relative merits of DVD-R DL? It seems that other than lacking this feature and
a slight bump in price; the Toshiba would also be a viable competitor. I
appreciate any thoughts anyone cares to share. TIA.
Francis R Harvey III
WB 303, (301)294-3952
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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