Digitimes reports that DVD burner prices have decreased considerably throughout the year despite of the tight supply, my guess is that manufacturers are looking for massive adoption of the technology in the retail and by OEMs... speaking of which, Paul is preparing a nice round-up of DVD-RWs devices that hopefully will be done soon when he returns from Las Vegas... how do you like that?

Retail prices for DVD-RW and DVD+RW drives have recently dropped to US$160-170 from US$370-380 in the first quarter of this year. NEC has priced some products even lower than this level.

If you want more details on pricing and specs of the different devices available you can have a look to our DVD burner pricewatch.

I remember when a CD-writer - not even a re-writer - just a writer - cost about £300.

We all thought that they were amazing, and we used to have to pay others (unless they were your friends) to copy CDs.

But what is the CD-RW drive today? Its almost a standard peripheral now like hte CD-ROM drive. DVD-ROM will head that way in the future, where games and software titles like Windows and Office will be so big they will require a DVD. It only makes sense that this will lead, over time, to cheaper DVD-RW drives.

Give it 2 years and I think the DVD-RW will be a standard.

I agree. My dad gets the windows developer kit, where they send you like every progie MS makes every month. They're now offering a DVD version. Normally theres like 80 cds you get every month. The DVD version comes with 3 DVDS.

I also recon games will go over to DVD (they have to, they're getting so big). Wouldnt it be cheaper (say in the case of UT2003) to have the game come with 1 DVD, instead of 3 cds? This will defently make DVD-Roms standard. Who knows, maybe as Phant thinks, DVD-RWs standard

I was just on price watch, and the fastest DVD-RW burner is DVD-R/6x. Isnt that a bit slow, considering you'll be burning a DVD? One of my cd burners is 4x, its not that bad. But if your going to be burning 4GBs worth of data, wont you need like a 12x burner minimum? Unless you want to waiting a week for the dvd to burn.

The writing speed for DVD+- are different that CDRWs. Currently, 4x DVD writers can burn a 4.7gb DVD in 15-17 minutes. 4x = 5.41MBps for DVDs adn 4x = 600kbps for CD.

DVD 1x = 1.2 - 1.3 mbps
CD 1x = 150 kbps

I might be wrong though.

Lets hope not That'd be pretty cool!